An Irishman's Diary

I see that one of the new big things on the French music scene is a 26-year-old rapper with the slightly odd name of Diam's. Born in Cyprus as Mélanie Georgiades, the diminutive performer grew up in Paris, where she has become the voice of the angry suburbs. It is a "raspy" voice, according to the International Herald Tribune, and its popularity derives in part from her rejection of traditional French identity.

"The France of the baguette and the beret is not my France," Diam's said in an interview on the eve of her US debut. She added: "I like to eat kebabs. I wear hoods." The rapper takes her art very seriously, it appears - so much so that she once dumped a perfectly good boyfriend because "happiness was sapping her creativity". Happiness can indeed be a terrible fate for an artist, as John Lennon's late period demonstrates. But in rap, where street credibility is everything, it must be avoided like the plague. As Diam's puts it herself: "You don't rap without rage."

Until now, at least, pop music - in any of its forms - has been one of the few cultural pursuits that the French do badly. The fact that English (American English especially) is the genre's vernacular doesn't help. But some of the fault lies with the French language itself, which is just too smooth and sexy to be taken seriously in an art form dominated by the frustrations of youth.

Even in the Eurovision Song Contest, where a country with 400 different types of cheese should have an advantage, the French have underperformed. Lack of variety used to be the problem. Their fixation with big ballads provoked Terry Wogan to complain once that they had been entering the same song every year "since they were hanging out their washing on the Maginot line".

Maybe Diam's will break with tradition in every sense by giving France its first credible international rock star. In the meantime, even with that annoying apostrophe, her name provokes a strange feeling of déjà vu. Wasn't there once another diminutive French singer with a raspy voice, a similar-sounding stage-name, and an upbringing in the tough suburbs of Paris? Yes, of course there was, although she was born way back in 1915. She was christened Édith (accent on e) Gassion, and was only 4ft 8ins at the height of her fame. But by then she had become much better known by her nickname - "Piaf" - a Parisian word for "sparrow". And although she has been dead for more than 40 years, her life is the subject of a film that opens here later this month: La Vie En Rose.

I haven't seen it yet. But one man who has is the reviewer of the New York Observer, who this week called it an "exhilarating and dazzling movie masterpiece". Actress Marion Cotillard does not so much play Piaf as "channel" her, the reviewer says, and in doing so delivers "one of the most inspired and breathtaking performances in film history". Book your tickets now.

Piaf shares much of the credit (or blame, depending where you stand) for her country's protracted love affair with the torch song. Either way, her voice is synonymous with traditional French identity, evoking not just the baguette and the beret, but the bouteille de vin as well. Yet she had the sort of street cred that a rapper would kill for. And her life was more turbulent than any rock star's, even to its untimely end.

Born - according to popular story anyway - on a pavement in Belville, she was abandoned by her parents: an alcoholic mother who sang in cafés and a circus acrobat father. The sickly waif was raised instead by a grandmother. But since the grandmother was a notorious madame, Edith grew up surrounded by prostitutes, whose loving care saved her from blindness and death.

At 16, she was a mother herself; her baby died from meningitis. A few years later she was discovered singing on the streets of Montmartre by a nightclub owner, who promoted her career until his murder, for which Piaf was one of the suspects.

During the second World War, she sang for the Nazis while working for the resistance. She hung around with Charlie Chaplin and Jean Cocteau, and included Yves Montand among her numerous partners before falling for the love of her life: world middleweight boxing champion Marcel Cerdan.

When Cerdan died in a plane crash, she succumbed to depression and, after two car accidents, became addicted to morphine. She married, divorced, married again (to a man 20 years her junior). When she died, aged 47, the Archbishop of Paris denied her a funeral Mass. But hundreds of thousands lined the route of her cortège.

Edith Piaf is buried in the famous Père Lachaise cemetery, near the Arab suburb of her birth, where presumably Diam's is now a favourite among angry youth. I hope the rapper lives a longer life than the chanteuse did. She could probably even risk a slightly happier one, without unduly compromising her art. Certainly, if her times are half as interesting as Piaf's, she won't be short of material.