Biography
Olivier Haudegond, performing as Didier Super, immediately calls up one overriding impression for anyone encountering his recordings or live shows: provocation in its purest form. Almost no other performer secured deals with imprints such as V2 and Universal on the strength of such material. The style fused cynicism, irony, bad taste, insolence, crude aggression, vulgarity, and, it must be conceded, deliberately poor music and vocals. What drew listeners to this brazen proposition? Perhaps the nervous thrill of possibly being chosen onstage to become the butt of ridicule, the satisfaction of watching someone else suffer that fate, the spectacle of Super’s razor-sharp demolition of egos, or simply the arrival of third-degree humor in the early 2000s. The draw encompassed all those elements together with the assurance of genuine laughter for anyone prepared to absorb an entire album or concert with an open attitude.
Three albums appeared from 2001 to 2008; the middle release reworked the debut into a supposedly more accessible edition that featured the anti-poodle anthem “Petit Caniche.” Music nevertheless remained secondary for Super, who deliberately rendered it abrasive—chiefly grunts over cheap synths occasionally edged with punk guitar, a nod to his origins in the punk scene—while prioritizing shock value. He filmed himself delivering “On Va Tous Crever” outside a hospital, “Y’en a Marre des Pauvres” outside one of Paris’s priciest restaurants, and Indian passers-by reciting “Thank you Tsunami” in French. At root, Super’s approach rested on an ethic of “no-respect whatsoever,” supplying the precise strain of humor the first years of the twenty-first century appeared to miss and attracting fans of Charlie Hebdo, Professeur Chauron’s Hara-Kiri, left-wing and anarchist tracts, or any manifestation of punk.
Three albums appeared from 2001 to 2008; the middle release reworked the debut into a supposedly more accessible edition that featured the anti-poodle anthem “Petit Caniche.” Music nevertheless remained secondary for Super, who deliberately rendered it abrasive—chiefly grunts over cheap synths occasionally edged with punk guitar, a nod to his origins in the punk scene—while prioritizing shock value. He filmed himself delivering “On Va Tous Crever” outside a hospital, “Y’en a Marre des Pauvres” outside one of Paris’s priciest restaurants, and Indian passers-by reciting “Thank you Tsunami” in French. At root, Super’s approach rested on an ethic of “no-respect whatsoever,” supplying the precise strain of humor the first years of the twenty-first century appeared to miss and attracting fans of Charlie Hebdo, Professeur Chauron’s Hara-Kiri, left-wing and anarchist tracts, or any manifestation of punk.
Albums
