There’s a good chance you witnessed Gojira‘s landmark performance at the Paris Olympic Games’ opening ceremony this summer. There’s also a chance you may have only experienced it in subpar quality, be it through hastily captured clips online or abbreviated broadcasts marred by commentary and more.
Due to a complicated web of broadcast rights and subsequent copyright claims, finding a pristine clip of the performance has not been an easy task since Gojira became the first metal band to perform at the Olympics this past July. That situation has just been rectified though, as the band have newly shared an official upload of that performance of “Mea Culpa (Ah! Ça ira!)“.
Pulling out the stops for the big moment, the group played the song while suspended from ledges on the side of the Conciergerie Palace in Paris, France. The track itself was composed alongside Victor Le Masne, who served as the musical director for the games. Mezzo-soprano Marina Viotti also contributed to the track and took part in the elaborately staged performance.
Gojira‘s aforementioned worldwide exhibition of metal caused controversy upon airing. The French band’s brand of progressive metal wasn’t every one’s cup of tea, and the macabre imagery of France’s revolutionary history, complete with a beheaded Marie Antoinette, didn’t exactly translate across all cultures.
While some went on to decry the performance as ‘Satanic’ and more, the song and its memorable live performance has since drummed up accolades, later being released as a single and landing a ‘Best Metal Performance’ GRAMMY Award nomination. We’ll have to wait until this coming February to see if Gojira take home some gold of their own.
This past summer found Gojira vocalist/guitarist Joe Duplantier speaking with Rolling Stone about how the song came about, stating:
“We very simply and organically came up with riffs and grooves that we like to play. We took it as an opportunity to represent the metal scene. So it was our task to really go for it and lay it down, not just be there and play a few notes to shock people. We decided to go full-on with double-kick drums, screaming, growling, epic moments, and a tempo breakdown at the end; we really wanted to show what metal is all about. And to our surprise, it was all accepted by the committee.
But they gave us some guidelines and things that were mandatory, for example, saying ‘Ah! Ça Ira’ which I ended up saying three times in the song. It’s rare for me to sing in French in Gojira. So it was a bit of a challenge. I was the one pushing to put some English in the middle of the song to make it more international.”
