There is No Funk in France

By Nayeli - I'll be leaving Paris soon, and I'm sad about that, I truly am. In general, this town has been good to me (despite the toll its climate takes on my thin Texan blood) and for the most part my time in Paris has been divine.

Save one thing.

Though Paris is the infamous resting place for Doors vocalist Jim Morrison, The City of Light has yet to "Light My Fire" for one main reason: I miss my rock n' roll. Along with bagels and peanut butter it seems to me that rock music - good, string-slapping, sing-a-long with the windows down rock n' roll - is as funny to the French as a basket of Freedom Fries.

Perhaps this is why it took me so long to get into the groove when I first arrived here. There is no groove in which to be gotten. In Paris, there is Jazz (there is always good jazz) and there is Techno and House, and pseudo-intellectual electronica abounds. But how long can a music junkie go without hearing the comforting melody of a guitar lick she can hum to? Search for a solid Soul standard in this country and you'll end up like I did, in the Federation Nationale des Achats de Cadres (FNAC, the French conglomerate for all things digitally inclined) copping a listen to your favorite Al Green album and wondering how you ever got this desperate for a little "Love and Happiness".

Starved for an aural release, I've club and concert-hopped each of Paris's 20 arrondisements, and I can confidently report that there is no Funk in France. But I'm an optimist; I'm still hoping to stumble across the next great Parisian garage band (although I can't even think of the first great Parisian garage band.)

This problem is beginning to manifest itself in a number of ways. I have a hard time participating in philosophical conversations with "Blitzkrieg Bop" on the brain. It took me four tedious hours in the Musee d'Orsay to realize that even the greatest Impressionist paintings "Don't Mean a Thing" to me right now. Sue me, but I just can't get "No Satisfaction" from the Condemnation to Freedom and the Blue Period when I'd trade Sartre for Sublime and Picasso for Paul McCartney "8 Days a Week".

Beginning to get the picture? I can't stop fantasizing about music! There's no escaping it! Each fellow subway rider bobbing his or her head to the ear buds of an iPod is salt in the wound. I can hear chord progressions in the bustle of traffic and the pickup to "Money" in the tapping of my upstairs neighbor's stiletto heels. I stood paralyzed on the spot, mouth agape, an actual LUMP IN MY THROAT the day I heard Madonna's croon on an add for France Telecom.

I know that I am being ridiculous, missing out on the "true" French experience, and my inability to sustain myself without the songs I love is exactly why I'll never be able to pass myself off as a cultured, European sophisticate. But I don't care. Call me "Crazy". Call me uncultured, call me an "American Girl" - just as long as you "Call Me" when you crank up the rock n' roll.