In the Anglophone disciplines of Popular Music Studies and French Studies, the subject of French popular music has become increasingly prevalent in recent years. Briggs's volume constitutes an important contribution to this growing body of work. It builds on the genre-specific research undertaken on la chanson française by Hawkins (Reference Hawkins2000), Poole (Reference Poole2000, Reference Poole2004), Tinker (Reference Tinker2005), Papanikolaou (Reference Papanikolaou2007) and Cordier (Reference Cordier2014), and on French protest music by Lebrun (Reference Lebrun2009), as well as developing the analysis of French popular music from a sociological perspective proposed by Looseley (Reference Looseley2003) and Portis (Reference Portis2004). Briggs, too, adopts a sociological approach to his subject matter, but also seeks to provide a detailed cultural history of popular music in post-war France, examining a variety of genres to provide insight into how they and their associated communities developed over time, thus providing a better understanding of the fluctuating social dynamics of the 1960s and 1970s in France. He explains that ‘in all these cases music articulated the values of these new social constellations and their significance within French society’ (p. 10).

The processes by which social values are is then the focus of the volume's five chapters, which deal with a different genre in turn. Chapter 1 focuses on yé-yé music and such stars as Johnny Hallyday, Françoise Hardy and Sylvie Vartan, to explore how they and others, together with their youth fans and audiences, created a new, globally oriented community of copains (buddies). However, the chapter also takes into consideration the limitations of this new community, by comparing it with the unruly youth subcultural community of the blousons noirs and reflecting on the inclusion of young women in this community, and the assertion of alternative youth identities that embodied the values of the Catholic Church or the Communist Party. Chapter 2 then analyses the traditional sound of chanson that stood in opposition to yé-yé. According to Briggs, ‘chanson offered an imagined combination of tradition and modernity to unify audiences and reinforce the continued solidarity of France in the face of globalization’ (p. 48). After tracing the development of the meaning of chanson via the constitutive discourse of the genre produced during the 1950s and 1960s, Jacques Brel, Georges Brassens, Léo Ferré and Serge Gainsbourg are the representative artists used here to argue the extent to which such definitions of the genre functioned to conceptualise both producers and consumers of chanson as members of a distinctively French community.

The post-May 1968 period is the focus of Chapter 3, as Briggs examines the revolutionary sound of progressive rock, the genre of the French underground. He traces the story of the genre so as to illustrate the turn away from the broad sense of a global community emphasised by yé-yé and chanson, towards a more fragmented and multifarious understanding of ‘community’. Briggs analyses the relationship between music and the New Left, and then the Freak Left, focusing on groups such as Maajun and Red Noise, and takes into consideration the use made of classical music by groups like Magma and Heldon. Chapter 4 focuses on the re-emergence of debates at the beginning of the 1970s concerning regionalism and regional identity. Briggs takes Breton music as his case study, and focuses primarily on the work of Alan Stivell in order to illustrate ‘the development of more particular forms of community that were in opposition to the universalist notions of the 1960s’ (p. 111). The final chapter takes punk as its focus, which arose in France during the 1970s as a reaction to progressive rock and pop music in general, and which ‘articulated a new type of community, at once exclusive and inclusive, keeping with the tenor of the more specific communities imagined in French culture during this period’ (p. 146). Briggs examines the notions of subculture and authenticity as they apply to French punk, and traces the development of the genre during the 1970s, focusing on bands such as Stinky Toys and Métal Urbain.

The volume constitutes an important contribution to our understanding of French popular music. The wide range of material that Briggs covers demonstrates the ways in which music in this period speaks to the construction of French society and French identities in the post-war period, informed by the notions of globalisation and mondialisation. The coverage of a diverse range of social groups allows Briggs to deftly narrate the complex developments within the popular musical landscape in France during the 1960s and 1970s primarily, and to illustrate the extent to which social groups and communities made use of music to articulate their identity and social belonging. The companion website allows the reader to listen to the songs that Briggs analyzes in depth, facilitating further critical engagement with the material presented.

Yet the wide-ranging nature of the volume is perhaps also one of its limitations. There are moments in the tracing of the various histories of the genres where the reader would appreciate further information about the sources used, the variations in the experiences of the different communities, and the nuances in the rhetoric surrounding each of the genres described. Indeed, more direct quotations from the various books and press media sources consulted would also be useful at times, to provide more contextualising information. The reader is also often required to make the connections between the chapters and the various genres explored, and to sometimes infer the significance of the developments examined.

Nevertheless, the cultural history approach to the various genres of this period that the volume provides constitutes an important contribution to the study of French pop music in Anglophone contexts. The way in which Briggs links these genres to the socio-cultural developments of the period, and to broader debates regarding French identity, traditions and ideas of ‘community’, means that the volume will be of interest to scholars working on cultural change in post-war France, as well as to those interested in French popular music. Because the volume focuses primarily on the historical developments of the genres in question, it only touches on ideas of celebrity and gender difference, and on popular music developments in France post 1980. These areas constitute potential new avenues for research in French popular music, all of which will build on the research presented in Briggs's volume.