“When you look, you can get angry”: Jocelyne Béroard (Kassav) regrets the time when the singer Carlos dressed up “as a big comforter”

This Friday, September 2, France 3 will broadcast, in prime time, the documentary These songs from our holidays. Viewers will notably discover images of Carlos performing one of his hits Rosalie. Jocelyne Béroard, of the group Kassav ‘, now regrets the clichés conveyed at the time by the singer on the West Indies, reveals Entertainment TV.

On March 30, 2021 on TMC, Etienne Carbonnier had offered viewers a return to the past with Canap95a program designed as a true rendezvous with nostalgia. “We’ve had the idea of ​​doing a show about the 90s for a year. But it was impossible to do everything in an hour and a half. So we focused on that year, with a presidential election, social movements, hits, cult shows […] We show things as they happened. We had to find the right balance between those who say that everything was better before and those who rebel against everything. We judge an era that was not ours”explained the columnist of Daily to Parisian. And if viewers were able to watch certain sequences amused or moved, others were scandalized. Inappropriate, sexist or racist remarks against Pepita on the show Pyramidpissed off the public. Reflections that Pepita “suffered at each broadcast”, but who “at the time nobody was shocked”explained Etienne Carbonnier.

“All these are cliches”

Sign that times have changed, the word is also freed up on the side of those who lived through the 70s and 80s. In the documentary These songs from our holidays, the floor is notably given to the singer Jocelyne Béroard, the accomplice of the late Jacob Desvarieux of the group Kassav’. She evokes in the program the singer carlos who brought back successful titles from his travels in the West Indies. Relieved of the words in Creole, the songs had a new look in French, ready to hit … Something to annoy the singer who notably returned to one of the biggest hits of the singer Rosalie. Originally written and composed by Georges Plonquitte, the song is one of the hits of 1978 in France. “When Carlos took over Rosalie, it was already a hit in the West Indies. And everyone was happy!” reveals the interpreter of Hold on tight.

The stage costumes of the psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto’s son do not excite him much more. “Now, well, disguised as a big cuddly toy and company… These are all clichés“, she laments about the madras print outfits worn to recall the atmosphere of the tropics. “In fact, when you look, you can get angry. It’s almost over today we don’t do that anymore“, she believes. Jocelyne Béroard however gives a good point to the approach which will have had a benefit, to make known some snippets of Caribbean music in mainland France. “At the time, these clichés did not bother usbecause it was an opportunity to hear our songs, the ones we liked, on French television or on the radio“, concludes the singer. An era now over.