Barthes - Édith Piaf, Non je ne regrette rien

"For his rare phenomenon to occur, for music to enter language, there must be, of course, a certain physique of the voice (by physique I mean the way in which the voice behaves in the body--or in which the body behaves in the voice). What has always struck me about Panzéra's voice is that... [his] voice was always secured, animated by a quasi-metallic strength of desire: it is a "raised" voice... an erected voice--a voice which gets an erection... Panzéra always sang with his entire body, full-throatedly: like a schoolboy who goes out into the countryside and sings for himself... to kill everything bad, depressed, anguished in his head. In a sense, Panzéra always sang with the naked voice. (Barthes, "Music, Voice, Language," pg. 283-4)

When reading this passage, Édith Piaf came to mind. Her voice is absolutely suspending. It raises and falls, and it is powerful, wakening. (Maybe I shouldn't be using adjectives.) It seems, at least to me, to have a type of body (especially at some points when she sings "rien"). In Barthes' talk of the grain of the voice, Piaf is a natural fit. During lecture we associated words like texture and weight to grain, and we spoke of the grain being the process of signifying, not the signal itself. I imagine Piaf's voice to embody that type of friction, between music and language without being either.

EDIT: Just scrolled down and saw that someone else posted the same song. That's cool.