Benjamin Biolay – Rose Kennedy (2001)

La vie est presque belle- Life is almost beautiful.

Benjamin Biolay (‘Novembre Toute L’année’)

‘Rose Kennedy’ (2001) is the spellbinding debut of Benjamin Biolay, an album like no other that holds a special place in this great French artist’s discography. The wonder and amazement starts with the fact that a young French musician records a concept album about JFK’s sister Rosemary, a very unusual and pretty vision to start with.

To this day, the Kennedys are still being regarded as America’s showpiece family by many Americans. But already at the acclaimed presidential election of John F. Kennedy in November 1960, the family vest was no longer white. Nearly two decades earlier, in November 1941, a personal and a family tragedy took place: the Kennedy Lobotomy. The victim: Rosemary, aged 23 then.

Rosemary showed slower development due to birth complications, but nevertheless developed into a lively, attractive young woman during her time as a diplomat daughter in London, albeit a shy young woman. Unhappy with her return to the USA in 1940, her mood clouded. She became moody, irascible and aggressive, breaking out at night- adolescent behavior we have heard of countless times without pathologizing. But her father Joseph feared a pregnancy as a result of her escapades and ordered a lobotomy on her that changed everything.

Back then there were no antidepressants or other drugs for the treatment of psychosis and a lobotomy was performed to “soothe” people with “uncontrolled emotional life”. However, the ability to abstract thinking is also inevitably destroyed in a lobotomy. For Rosemary, even more went wrong: she could no longer walk, only babble, she was incontinent; she had fallen back to the mental level of a toddler. For the patriarch she was even more of a shame in this condition, and he hid her in a Catholic nursing home – hiding her from the public, but also from his own family. He paid the bills, but didn’t show up.

It breaks your heart that such a lively young woman had to spend the rest of her life vegetating in the monotony of a mental hospital after a tragic decision of her father, and Biolay imagines and interprets this monotony and general tragic of this story beautifully.

Gloomy elegance is the main theme of this record, faded glamour and dreams held together by a ghostly tenderness and tristesse. The mood is so intimate that it places us right into vague, distant memories in Rose’s mind- a mind that is so strangely twisted and interrupted.

When Rose is apathically staring out of a window facing the sea (Les Joggers Sur La Plage), we catch the silhouttes of joggers with mysteriously slowed down movements, a flickering memory to past motion. We see the Hamptons with seagulls and past summer loves, feeling the heat of vanished summers still burning on lowest flame (Un Été sur la Côte). The recurring marching theme revives the world Rose was born into, a world of diplomacy, politics, and parades (Soixante-Douze Trombones Avant La Grande Parade), along with words that merge her memory with the vegetable state she’s in: “Seventy- two trombones / Before the grand parade / A right turn / And the story slips“.

‘Rose Kennedy’ is a special achievement by the 28-year old Biolay, and one that is truly unique. A beautifully melancholic immersion into a general and not temporary state of slow-motion doom, devastating but also miraculously tender, reminiscent of the sleeping beauty who is entwined and buried by gentle thorns. A state where there is no way out of, a state where it’s November all year (Novembre Toute L’Annee) as Biolay drags us into the endless autumnal state with the first song on ‘Rose Kennedy’. A state of being eternally stuck in the last hour of the last day (La Derniere Heure Du Dernier Jour*) , a staggeringly beautiful song, a defenseless stream-of-conciousness of the day that changed Rose’s life forever and the sentiments that led her there: ” This is my last chance / To take my bow / To tell those who remain / Watch your facts and gestures /…/ I want my father / I want the ambassador to be proud / Overwhelmed by the penalty / Then life resumes / The Last Hour / Of the last day /…/ I plunged into the night / I haven’t even seen my life”.

Everything that Biolay developed to perfection as his career moved on is already audible here: A beautiful, dramatic orchestration, masterful arrangements, the perfect balance between traditional chanson and modern pop with a 70s twist, recurring piano motifs and samples, a relaxed, smoky and sexy vocal delivery. Biolay’s voice is also not fully formed here, but it has the charm of imperfection and, of course, many cigarette-nights.

Throughout the record the music stops several times to make place for samples of Marilyn Monroe singing ‘River of no Return’:

If you listen you can hear it call (Wailaree)
There is a river called ‘the river of no return-

We can’t help it but are put in a lulling, saddening trance by her voice and ghostly appearance which complement this record perfectly. Unfulfilled grandeur. Almost ~
With building Marilyn into his record, Biolay does not only make another tragic reference to the Kennedys, but this reference might go further than one would expect: Monroe was the mistress of both, John F. Kennedy and his brother Bobby. Murder conspiracies surround her death with just 36, one of them accusing the Kennedys to be responsible for her death.
In 2007, a partially redacted FBI document was discovered that suggests that the Kennedys sought to provide Monroe with drugs that would cause her to overdose and subsequently left her to die, comliciting this along with Monroe’s psychiatrist. The reason for the crime: Marilyn threatened to make both affairs public.

So is ‘Rose Kennedy’ not a record about only one, but more tragic victims of the powerful Kennedy family? We will very likely never learn the truth. But Biolay rescues Rose and Marilyn from the oceans of flickering memory, confusing cacophony, sinister cover-ups and misinformation, and immortalizes them and their story in ‘Rose Kennedy’; frames them in ghostly sepia, beautiful and tender, not indignant. It’s actually an impossible thing to do, by all means an unparalled and most stunning achievement and arrangement by Biolay.

The grandeur of tragedy – nobody arranges and delivers it like Biolay.

by Saliha Enzenauer

*
La Dernière Heure du dernier jour was only included on the re-issue of Rose Kennedy