Overview

Serge Gainsbourg is arguably the Francophone songwriter whose contribution to the international appeal of French popular music has been the most significant in the post-war era. Sampled by Beck, De La Soul, Massive Attack and Fatboy Slim, remixed by Howie B. and David Holmes, translated by Mick Harvey, and covered by Iggy Pop, Donna Summer, Portishead, Madeleine Peyroux, the Pet Shop Boys and Franz Ferdinand, his music has crossed borders in a way no other modern French-language singer-songwriter’s has. The interdisciplinary approach of Serge Gainsbourg: An International Perspective engages in a dialogue between musicology, film and media studies, literature, cultural studies, gender studies, and more, revealing the broad scope of Gainsbourg’s impact in and outside of France, from the late 1950s through today. Bringing together a large selection of scholars from across the world, this collection of 26 chapters emphasizes his unique position in French culture, covering issues such as his musical influences and collaborations, esthetics and form, his experimentations with disciplines other than music (mainly film and literature), not to mention the conversation at play between high art and mass culture in this artist’s multifaceted body of work.

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Reviews

""A provocative and pungent artist like Gainsbourg hobbled with academic footnotes and impersonal hedging? This book could have been a curate's egg. But solid research and fresh insight make it more like an egg by Fabergé."" --Momus (Nick Currie) ""This important collection reveals Gainsbourg the man, the musician and the creative chameleon, for those who don't know him and for those (like me) who thought they did. It's sharply analytical but wears its scholarship lightly and is highly readable, buzzing with ideas for understanding Gainsbourg in all his versatility, complexity and ambivalence."" --David Looseley, Emeritus Professor of Contemporary French Culture, University of Leeds, UK, Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques ""This diverse collection creates a vivid, nuanced, and compelling portrait of Serge Gainsbourg, musician, artist, rebel."" --Gerald Prince, Professor of French and Francophone Studies, University of Pennsylvania, USA

A provocative and pungent artist like Gainsbourg hobbled with academic footnotes and impersonal hedging? This book could have been a curate’s egg. But solid research and fresh insight make it more like an egg by Fabergé. * Momus (Nick Currie) * This important collection reveals Gainsbourg the man, the musician and the creative chameleon, for those who don’t know him and for those (like me) who thought they did. It's sharply analytical but wears its scholarship lightly and is highly readable, buzzing with ideas for understanding Gainsbourg in all his versatility, complexity and ambivalence. * David Looseley, Emeritus Professor of Contemporary French Culture, University of Leeds, UK, Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques * This diverse collection creates a vivid, nuanced, and compelling portrait of Serge Gainsbourg, musician, artist, rebel. * Gerald Prince, Professor of French and Francophone Studies, University of Pennsylvania, USA * Designed for Gainsbourg newbies and old-hands alike, this collection is invaluable for those who want to delve into the musical creativity of the artist, and understand better the French culture, warts and all, in which he emerged. * Popular Music * This confluence of scholarly contributions in three sections examines the artist’s life, work, and reception both within French society and on a global scale. * The French Review * A stunning collection of reflections on Serge Gainsbourg the man, the myth, the songsmith. In their introduction, the editors succinctly but convincingly chart the emergence of Gainsbourg studies. Their far too modest hope that this book serves to “legitimate” Gainsbourg “as a subject of research for academia” is surely surpassed: by virtue of its depth and breadth, it rightfully constitutes the foundational stone of (global) Gainsbourg studies. * French Studies *

Author Information

Olivier Julien is Associate Professor at Sorbonne Université, France, where he teaches the history and musicology of popular music. A permanent member of the IReMus research group (Sorbonne Université/CNRS) and a member of the editorial board of Volume! La revue des musiques populaires, he is the editor of Sgt. Pepper and the Beatles: It Was Forty Years Ago Today (2009 ARSC Award for Best Research in Recorded Rock and Popular Music) and Over and Over: Exploring Repetition in Popular Music (with Christophe Levaux, Bloomsbury, 2018). Olivier Bourderionnet is Professor of French at the University of New Orleans, USA. He teaches courses on contemporary French literature and culture, on pop culture and the cultural industries. His book Swing Troubadour. Vian, Brassens, Gainsbourg: les Trente Glorieuses en 33 tours (2012) examines the transformation of post-WWII France through the prism of popular music and the impact of jazz on French chanson. Bourderionnet has also published numerous articles touching on a broad variety of topics such as music in the interwar period, music and film and French Hip-hop culture.

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