France top 40

Just as with my last post, I am doing my own research using the website top40-charts.com. I discovered some interesting things in my last post and in this post I will concentrate on the countries previously mentioned in other studies, the first being France. France definitely had the largest variety of singers and the most countries represented in one country's top hits. This ranged from French artists, to American artists, to Colombian, and Swedish-Congolese artists! 35% were French artists while 25% were American artists. There were 12.5% artists from the U.K., 5% from the Ivory Coast, 5% from the Congo (including a Swedish-Congolese artist), 5% from Romania, and a Canadian and French artist, Pakistani-American artist, Barbadian, and Colombian artist all had 2.5%. Almost half the songs were in French while the rest were in English and one was in Spanish. This fits pretty well with the radio quota which states French national radios have to play 40% French music. If you include former colonies of France and nations that speak French, like the Ivory Coast and Congo, then this does fit within the 40%. Oh and by the way, a cartoon mole has 2 of their top 40 hits, this one being number 4:

So if the singing mole wasn't strange enough, the number 7 song in France is "Le Meme que Moi" which means "The Same as Me." My only question is, who is the kid in this video and is it a boy or girl? He looks like a boy and is dressed like a boy and even kind of sounds like a boy, but all of his gestures suggests girl. Hmm . . . see for yourself.

  Also, his name is Leo, so he is a boy . . .
What is also interesting is that two American artists who I have never heard of here in America made the top forty hits for France. Those two artists are Nadia Ali, a Pakistani-American and Beth Ditto, an overweight woman who used to be in the group "The Gossip" and is known for her wild ways. She has been popular in England for years but has never seen much success in the States. Here is a photo of Beth Ditto from Spinner.

It's no surprise why Beth nor Nadia have had much success in America- Beth because of her appearance and wild ways don't strike a chord with Britney Spears fans here and Nadia's Pakistani roots, not to mention her not too great of a voice, as shown in this music video where she just dances half of the song:

So, clearly westernization is not happening in France, yet globalization is very present. This fits well with the studies done on France in past posts where it showed many artists who sung in French from other nations usually moved to France because of all the controversy and turmoil happening at home. In France is usually where they found acceptance and the top forty hits of France today show that.