Serge Gainsbourg : An International Perspective

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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“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