Anyone who tuned in to the 2024 Olympics opening ceremony on Friday hoping for big pop music performances like Celine Dion’s and Lady Gaga’s was probably not prepared to see Marie Antoinette, beheaded and bloody, singing the 19th-century French anthem “Ah! Ça Ira” with the French heavy metal band Gojira, reports Rolling Stone. The quartet took the reins from the decapitated queen with aplomb, ending her reign with double-kick bass drums, pneumatic rhythm guitar, and frontman Joe Duplantier’s growled interpretation of the lyrics, which insist that after revolution, everything will be just fine.
Each member of the band – Duplantier; his brother, drummer Mario; lead guitarist Christian Andreu; and bassist Jean-Michel Labadie – performed their parts in a different window of Paris’ Conciergerie palace with fire spraying every which way in front of them and mezzo-soprano Marina Viotti gliding by on a ship, singing the song as opera. The performance ran only about two and a half minutes, but between the jaw-dropping surrealist visuals and Gojira’s bang-your-head-until-it-falls-right-off aggression, it became one of the most talked-about moments of the night. There’s been backlash from some right-wing commentators, who were quick to denounce the performance as satanic propaganda. But for metalheads, it was a different kind of validation – recognition of the genre on a world stage.
For Duplantier, it was a huge responsibility. Gojira have spent nearly 30 years perfecting their metal grooves, earning the respect of genre leaders like Metallica as well as the media; Rolling Stone named their 2005 album, From Mars To Sirius, one of the greatest metal albums of all time and their most recent album, 2021’s Fortitude, one of the best that year. As Duplantier tells Rolling Stone over a Zoom from his dad’s house in the southwest of France on Monday, he’s still making sense of it all.
Rolling Stone: How are you feeling about the performance today?
Joe Duplantier: “It’s a bit unreal. It’s been in the works for months. Ever since we were contacted by the Olympic Committee and the composer, Victor le Masne, I wasn’t sure what was going to happen just because it sounded completely unreal. The amount of people that would see us live kind of eclipsed the moment. I wasn’t thinking about what it was going to be because it was just too mind-bending to think about. So the reality of the moment was absolutely mind-blowing from where we were, up there at the Conciergerie and the view we had of the scenery and all the Olympic teams, passing by on boats. It was pretty surreal.”
Rolling Stone: Did you think much about the responsibility of representing metal on the world stage?
Duplantier: “I try not to think too much about that because it continues to blow my mind [laughs]. The Olympic Committee could have asked literally anybody to play. I’m thinking of bands like Metallica or AC/DC that are household names and powerhouses in our genre that we all revere and are our heroes. We never considered ourselves the biggest band in the world that would be worthy to play the Olympics or anything like that. It’s so weird.
“The way I think about it is it’s a challenge in 2024 to give hope to people, to show something original. People have seen everything from landing on the moon to AI. So it was a challenge for Paris and the Committee to express something fresh, new, and original [by booking us] and also show what France is all about.
“At least for our part, the fact that metal and opera had never been seen together on TV and in front of so many people before is a statement for the country of France. It’s saying, ‘Hey, look. We’re still pushing the boundaries in the world.’ So congrats to France for putting this together.”
Read more at Rolling Stone, and watch Gojira’s Olympics performance below: