Le défaut passager (extraits)

Résumé 0

One can approach an underground musician’s job or function as a succession of indescribable dog’s breakfasts, where poop occasionally competes with pee, where sleep and food are not always a given, where life on the road and car mechanics involve a particular connection with geography and punctuality. But the reader must remain alert and keep in mind that the anecdotes herein were carefully picked among several hundreds of other perfectly forgettable ones, in which the comfort of a nice bed goes along with a successful gig – to such an extent that the story becomes not even worth telling.Touring as a musician can also feel like going out on an enlightened escapade, like a form of anti-tourism, an expedition away from official circuits, in the fat of the map. Where one might also be wondering if the whole thing could only be a gloriously vain pursuit, behind the safe protection of a van windshield? A mere lateral journey, having a look elsewhere for the sheer sake of comparing how different it is to here?The underground can also let one believe in the encounter of some form of radical otherness, some kind of extra-capitalistic neo-exoticism. But along with physical rather than mental discomfort, one may realize that the margins that have for decades taken shelter in industrial wastelands, in trains, in hotels, in abandoned stores, and in so many temporary and transitional places – these margins have become an aesthetic form in its own right, a quasi-international standard, very much like a vacation village. And they also are a smoke-screen for galloping gentrification. Alternative creation is certainly political here, but it is also a blatant and obvious marker of segregation.Traduit par Stéphane Corcoral.