by Jeremy Allen (Music 780.63 Gainsbourg)
Singer/songwriter Serge Gainsbourg never
become a household name on this side of the pond, but he’s regarded as a
pivotal artist in French pop, with a career that spanned the 50s to the 80s.
Even when he wasn’t working as much in the 80s, he continued to enjoy a kind of
star status, appearing frequently on French talk shows in his final years until
his death in 1991. Unlike a lot of pop artists, he has somehow continued to
rise in popularity posthumously. Some of his 70s albums that only sold copies
in the five figures during their initial run ended up going gold in the decades
after his death, and there have been lots of tribute albums featuring his work
in recent years as well.
What has been lacking is an English-language
biography describing his unusual and varied musical career, but that issue has
now been addressed with the publication of a great new book by Jeremy Allen
called Relax Baby Be
Cool: The Artistry and Audacity of Serge Gainsbourg that
you can check out from the Polley Music Library.
In many ways, Gainsbourg’s popularity, even in
earlier times within France, is a little surprising: his voice, though one
grows to enjoy it, isn’t particularly noteworthy. He doesn’t cut the most
handsome figure for a pop star. And it’s said that he wasn’t a remarkable
performer, either, seeming a little stiff and uncomfortable on the stage, and
struggling with stage fright as well. But he was a phenomenal songwriter, who
is said to have raised the modern chanson (or “song” — a chanson in the modern
sense is basically any French-language song) to a true art form again. And his
lyrics were clever, layered, and sometimes controversial, all of which surely
contributed to his reputation.
In Relax Baby Be
Cool, we first learn that Gainsbourg came to a music
career relatively late as pop artists go. In the mid-1950s, when he would have
been in his mid to late 20s, he was making his way as a fairly low-key jazz
musician, following in the footsteps of his father. The book doesn’t get into
this much, but at the time he still considered himself more of a painter. Then
a chance meeting with novelist and songwriter Boris Vian gave him the courage
to give performance of his own music a try. He tried out different stage names
as a musician: born Lucien Ginsburg and known as Lucien Guimbaud during the
Occupation, he first chose Julien Grix as his stage name around 1954. By ’58,
he was registering songs and performing as Serge Gainsbourg, when he recorded
his first record, “Du Chant a La Une!” This record was followed by three more
that all found him working in a very jazz-influenced idiom. None of them were
big hits in France upon release, but now some of the songs on them are among
his best-regarded.
By the early 1960s, he was transitioning from
jazz toward the French style of rock and roll-influenced pop music of the time,
known as “ye-ye.” While he still wasn’t seeing a lot of success for his own
albums, he was writing songs for other performers that were getting popular. On
his own records, he experimented with African percussion on the 1964 album
Percussions, and of course lots of his other music, from jazz to rock and roll
influences, was heavily inspired by American music, which had already started
to dominate international approaches to pop music by that decade. And we learn
that 1965 was a pivotal year for Gainsbourg’s popularity as a songwriter, when
he wrote “Poupee de cire, Poupee de son,” which won the Eurovision Song Contest
as performed by France Gall. He began to write more music for television and
movie use, and appeared on French screens as well, which began to raise his
level of recognition. The rest of his career featured a combination of music
and television appearances — as mentioned earlier, he was a regular guest on
French late-night shows into the 80s.
Relax Baby Be
Cool starts out
more or less chronologically, but by the middle of the book, it becomes divided
into a variety of different perspectives for understanding Gainsbourg: the “aesthetics”
chapter looks at the very particular form of organized disorder he maintained
in his home. “Muses” investigates the three women with whom he spent most of
his time, and how they affected his work. Several chapters focus on specific
albums throughout his career. And later chapters like “Fame” and “Provocation”
investigate his latter-year tendencies, when he created a “Ganesbarre”
alter-ego to represent his more boorish tendencies.
Throughout the book, various controversies
follow Gainsbourg around: he was a fascinating but very flawed person, and
author Jeremy Allen tries to portray that total picture of his work including
his sometimes poor behavior. And it’s an interesting time for a fairly thorough
biography on Gainsbourg to appear: issues of cultural appropriation, or the
inappropriate relationships that many male pop artists had with much younger
women in the 60s and 70s are discussed with acknowledgement of the contemporary
discussions we’ve all been having. Books about Gainsbourg or 60s pop figures
more generally written 10 or 20 years ago often lacked a lot of the more
worldly nuance that attempts to bring balance to this book. Perhaps we’ll start
to see more books about the icons of those days with more of a broad social
conscience in the coming years.
(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Sounds French:
Globalization, Cultural Communities, and Pop Music, 1958-1980 by
Jonathyne Briggs or Cult Musicians: 50
Progressive Performers You Need To Know by Robert Dimery.)
( publisher’s official Relax Baby, Be Cool web
site ) | ( official Jeremy Allen Twitter
feed )
Recommended by Scott S.
Polley Music Library
Have you read or listened to
this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?
New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!
Check out this, and all the other great music resources, at the Polley Music Library, located on the 2nd floor of the Bennett Martin Public Library at 14th & "N" St. in downtown Lincoln. You'll find biographies of musicians, books about music history, instructional books, sheet music, CDs, music-related magazines, and much more. Also check out Polley Music Library Picks, the Polley Music Library's e-mail newsletter, and follow them on Facebook!
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