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I was watching this video while practicing my listening comprehension, and was struck by the fact that the girl refers to music as variété and this is widely understood to refer to music by everyone she interviews. I had always called music....la musique. I thought it was easy...
Yet after looking it up in three multilingual dictionaries, this is not how the term variété is translated.
Is this slang, or am I missing something? What is variété generally understood to mean?
Variété is short for Musique de variétés and is a common word (albeit not often used by young people) to refer to popular music.
Wiktionnaire has that definition.
To add to Fatalize's answer I would say that 'variété' has come to designate older music by French artists, such as the music of Claude François or Alain Souchon. A similar term is "la chanson française".
"Variété" can indeed be used to refer to French songs (Variété française), but first and foremost, it's the French equivalent of "variety" : "Une variété de légumes" ou "Il n'y a pas beaucoup de variété", which of course refers to options. So "la variété française" is nothing more than "Une variété de chansons françaises". As for "variété française", it can also refer to TV shows : "Les émissions de variétés", same structure as "Les chansons de variétés".
I suggest you simply take a look at the French-English translation of "variety" : http://dictionnaire.reverso.net/francais-anglais/vari%C3%A9t%C3%A9
The expression "Variétés" had originally been invented in the 1960s to designate various kinds of popular music such as crooner songs, jazz, rock'n'roll, pop music, modern or traditional french songs, "musette" and so on...
By the way, all kinds of sound makers not able to play music in an academic sense were called "artistes de variétés". In that way, the word "music" was clearly reserved to academic music, this means classical music, needing a high level of knowledge and ability: In fact, it is a little bit funny to use the same word "musician" to mention both someone who can play any piano partition from Liszt or Chopin and some little bimbo who hardly knows what a chord is, who cannot really sing or play correctly any classical part, and who wouldn't be able to say why, when there's one # on the score, it is always an F#....
For those reasons, French journalists of the past used to make a distinction between "musique" and "variété". But don't be afraid: in France too, today, any 18-year-old singing bimbo, whom you can only hear through a big amplifier, is called a "musician"! Isn't it funny?
