“La vérité est une espèce menacée”. Jérôme Minière’s Quest for Meaning in an Age of ‘End Times’ Spirituality

Abstract

Jérôme Minière’s song “La vérité est une espèce menacée”, first released online on January 11, 2018, strikes the listener by its profound interdependence of text, music, and interpretation. Text, music, voice, programming, instruments, editing, mixing, and clip making bear the same name, Jérôme Minière, who has rightly been acclaimed as one of today’s particularly promising multitalents. Compared to the parameters of popular music, the song is atypical in that it is not sung but recited. Its floating tonality corresponds with the fragile construction of the text while the video clip underlines the impression of fragmentation and flow perfectly in tune with the rhythm of the music and the spoken word. Altogether the song evokes an existential journey from metaphysical and societal crisis to arrival at a moment of potential becoming, an ‘end times’ spirituality, relative and ambivalent.