A thug’s grub: food and drink as status in Renaud’s songs
A thug’s grub: food and drink as status in Renaud’s songs

Summary/Abstract: Renaud Séchan (known as just “Renaud”) has been a particularly popular French singer-songwriter since the mid-seventies. This success lies in part with the persona he builds of an angry, yet sentimental, small-time thug, and in part on the use of a humorous poetic language, including frequent puns. In this paper, we show how both humour and the creation of a paradoxical character can be linked to the themes of food and drink, as well as to the less prevalent theme of vomit. Renaud describes food from the angle of abundance or scarcity, to signal groups who have and groups who have not. Furthermore, he uses both food and drink as markers of the separation between his beer-drinking, candy-stealing peers and a more dominant community of wine-drinkers and meat-eaters. To verify this hypothesis, we propose a quantitative analysis of all the mentions of food, drink, as well as vomit, in a corpus encompassing Renaud’s song production between 1975 and 2016, as they appear in his collected works, published with the artist’s approval in 2017. We examine the words used for food, drink, and vomit, and map their locations both within lines and relative to jokes in the corpus, showing that they tend to appear at the very end of lines and/or of jokes. We combine this quantitative approach with close readings to explore the role of food and drink in the songs’ humorous mechanisms and their concomitant use as social and gender markers in Renaud’s proposed worldview. Our analyses bring insight into the endearing contradictions of Renaud’s man-child and thug character, fluctuating between gender stereotypes and gender fluidity, self-deprecation and hostile outbursts, a complexity supported by the use of humorous incongruity.

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