The late '50s and early '60s was an interesting time for American musical tastes. Listeners who considered themselves hip embraced a wide variety of styles, from the calypso of Harry Belafonte to the bossa nova of Antonio Carlos Jobim and even the chanson of Jacques Brel. If they listened to American pop it wasn't Elvis or Little Richard, but Nina Simone, who dared expand her repertoire beyond jazz to include spirituals and art songs.

Then the Beatles showed these Americans that they had nothing to be ashamed of with regard to rock 'n' roll, which at the time had already faded from the charts, anyway. As Louis Menand points out a recent issue of the New Yorker, more than any other artist, it was the European Fab Four who taught Americans to appreciate their own pop culture.

In the end, European pop culture suffered for it, and not just in the U.S. Americans, hip and non-hip alike, went on to essentially ignore any pop culture movements that weren't American. Attendance for foreign-language movies, never high in the first place, declined steadily, and no one buys chanson or calypso anymore. As the hegemony of American pop culture grew, it competed with and sometimes supplanted native pop styles.

Consequently, Europe now lives on a diet of Eurobeat, a thin gruel of ABBA, '70s disco and late '80s techno. Genuine European pop has been shoved aside by the more commercially savvy American brand. And since Europe isn't the Third World, European pop isn't even considered "world music," though that's where you usually find it at the record stores.

That doesn't mean good pop music isn't being made in Europe. For the last five years I've been trying to turn friends on to Paolo Conte, an eccentric, middle-aged Italian singer-songwriter whose canzone are spiked with jazz, blues, chanson and even R&B. What's misleading about these genre labels is that they don't begin to describe how fresh he sounds.

Arthur H at his Dec. 22 performance at Mediage TLG in Odaiba

I'm starting to feel the same way about Arthur H, a French pop singer who is much younger that Conte but whose music affects me the same way. He's been well received by critics, but they usually resort to describing him as "a French Tom Waits." Though the label does describe the voice, it doesn't do justice to chanson.

Nor the lyrics, though I have to take his word for it. When he introduced "Femme Ideale" at his Dec. 22 concert at Mediage TLG in Odaiba, he said it was a song about a woman with a beard and tattoos who floated through the sky. "It's very beautiful and very French," he added, "though in English it sounds very stupid."

Of course, even the want ads can sound like Rimbaud when they're read in French, but Arthur seemed to be getting at something else. Because English is the lingua franca of world pop, Anglophones take it for granted. We never really think that language itself is musical, only that rock sounds better in English. Chanson is as much spoken as it is sung, but doesn't sound awkward because French is so mellifluous. Chanson sung in English does sound "very stupid."

Arthur's music, like most chansons, lacks that most basic component of American pop -- melody -- but his songs still get under your skin. He borrows a lot of musical ideas from North Africa, which is much closer historically to the French people than America is, and it gives his tunes, whether ballads or ravers, an irresistible exotic cast.

Arthur uses groove the way jazz musicians do. His excellent band creates multitudes of ideas in a single phrase. "Naive Derviche" is repetitious (it's about a dancing woman who keeps "turning and turning and turning") but never numbing.

He can even get funky. Between "Inseparables mais . . .," which is as tight as a clenched fist, and the loose, horn-fueled "Les Pieds-Nickeles," Arthur provided a kicking Farfisa segue that might have had the crowd up on their feet -- if they'd only had a dance floor to move on.

The son of French singer Jacques Higelin, Arthur understands his legacy but strives to build on it rather than simply keep it alive. At one point he played "Alcool," a song that Serge Gainsbourg, the dirty old man of French pop, recorded 11 years before Arthur was born. His respect for Gainsbourg's influence was demonstrated by the simplicity of his presentation, solo piano and voice, to which he added his own touch, an extended jazz solo.

Still, his modernist take on chanson may simply baffle those people who normally listen to French music. The TLG audience was as appreciative as it could be, but much smaller than I expected.

I have to wonder why Arthur's new album, "Pour Madame X," his fifth and probably best, is not being released by his Japanese record company. Unlike the U.S., Japan has always offered French pop, both old and new, a ready audience. Jane Birkin just put out a live double album here of her hits that was recorded at Orchard Hall last September. Cool new French artists like Bertrand Burgalat and Air, with their internationalist techno take on French pops and Vanessa Paradis with her new Francophone versions of what sounds like American rock are very popular right now with the Shibuya-kei crowd.

Arthur H is more interesting and original than any of these musicians, and, I dare say, more French. Globalism is in, chauvinism out and nostalgia still sells. Arthur, who is definitely a world-class musician, doesn't seem to fit into this equation.