On Gojira Opening For The Olympic Games 2024
The French metal band Gojira made history by performing for the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympic Games, sparkling conversation.
LIVE SHOWNEWS
IZA BENKIRATE
7/30/20242 min read
This is a first in the metal world. On July 26, during the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympic Games, organized by Thomas Jolly, the biggest French metal band Gojira performed a metal version of “Ah! Ça ira”, an emblematic song of the French Revolution.
Made of twelve scenes, the opening ceremony showcased French culture and history. One the scene called “Liberté” (Liberty) had for theme the French Revolution. In this scene, we follow the masked torchbearer, a recurring character of the ceremony, through the comedians of the musical “Les Misérables” depicting Eugène Delacroix’s painting “La Liberté guidant le peuple” (Liberty Leading the People).
Suddenly, we are facing Marie Antoinette holding her decapitated head singing:
“Ah ! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira ! Les aristocrates à la lanterne. Ah ! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira ! Les aristocrates on les pendra.”
(Ah! It'll be fine, It'll be fine, It'll be fine! aristocrats to the lamppost. Ah! It'll be fine, It'll be fine, It'll be fine! the aristocrats, we'll hang them!).
That’s when Gojira enters. Attached to the sides of La Conciergerie, the building where Marie Antoinette was imprisoned before being guillotined, the band covers that chant, with heavy guitar riffs and drums, featuring Marina Viotti an opera singer. What about the setting? you may ask, well in front of them, a wall of fire flaring with the song and a rain of blood falling onto them.
This is a first in Olympic history. A metal band being part of the opening ceremony is a big step for the metal world. In fact, metal music is usually avoided in such settings maybe not to scare off the general public or perhaps because it became the norm to stick with what’s popular. Whatever the reason is, if there’s one, this performance triggered many different reactions: mainly positive for adepts of the genre, shocking for the people not used to it, and some, more conservative, even went as far as calling the performance satanic.
One sure thing is that it is helping to bring back the metal scene into the spotlight. Joe and Mario Duplantier, Christian Andreu, and Jean-Michel Labadie can be proud of themselves for marking history and putting up a crazy show as it is a “once in a lifetime experience” as the band stated on their Instagram.
Here’s the link if you want to watch or rewatch Gojira’s performance :
Pool, Getty Images