Day 149: Jean-Michel Jarre – Oxygène

If there’s one thing I’m happy to have discovered through this project, it’s that there’s a whole lot of space-themed music that I haven’t really explored. Frankly, I’m at a Katy Perry Blue Origin flight level of space music exploration, so it’s about time I get acquainted with some legends of the genre. Today’s album of choice is Jean-Michel Jarre’s Oxygène.

Album cover courtesy of Disques Motors/Polydor

Jean-Michel Jarre is a French pioneer in electronic music. His mother was a member of the French resistance and a concentration camp survivor, and his father was a film score composer. When he was a child, he started learning how to play piano and trumpet violin, and he would frequent a jazz club owned by his mother’s friend from the French resistance, where artists like John Coltrane and Chet Baker would regularly play. However, his musical awakening was seeing a performance of Stravinksy's The Rite of Spring at the Théatre de Champs Elysées.

Oxygène is Jarre’s second album, released in 1977, and it was the catalyst for his worldwide success. He had recorded it on a very low budget at a makeshift home studio. Several record companies rejected it, but it ended up becoming a huge phenomenon, and it’s even credited with leading “the synthesizer revolution of the Seventies.”

I know people really rate this album, but I’ve got to honestly say that it wasn’t the mind-blowing experience that I hoped it would be. I listened to the first two songs, "Oxygène (Part I)" and "Oxygène (Part II)", and while I was enjoying it, it just didn’t live up to the hype. So I thought I’d give Jean-Michel the respect he deserved and do it properly: get under my weighted blanket with my eye cover to listen to it with no distractions.

Unfortunately, it was still just good. Don’t get me wrong, I had a nice time, but maybe my expectations were just a tad too high from just how highly people speak about it. It wasn’t exactly plain, maybe a bit plain-adjacent based on what I was expecting, but my main issue was that I didn’t really feel or experience much when listening to it, and here I was thinking I was about to enjoy something immersive. I took a little journey when I would have liked a large one.

Despite all this, it’s still an 8.5/10, but I was expecting at least a 9. I would like to see him play it live though, that seems like a better way to enjoy it.