Description
Book SynopsisGilles Verlant's biography of Serge Gainsbourg is the best and most authoritative in any language
When Serge Gainsbourg died in 1991, France went into mourning: François Mitterand himself proclaimed him our Baudelaire, our Apollinaire. Gainsbourg redefined French pop, from his beginnings as cynical chansonnier and mambo-influenced jazz artist to the ironic yé-yé beat and lush orchestration of his 1960s work to his launching of French reggae in the 1970s to the electric funk and disco of his last albums. But mourned as much as his music was Gainsbourg the man: the self-proclaimed ugly lover of such beauties as Brigitte Bardot and Jane Birkin, the iconic provocateur whose heavy-breathing Je t'aime moi non plus was banned from airwaves throughout Europe and whose reggae version of the Marseillais earned him death threats from the right, and the dirty-old-boy wordsmith who could slip double-entendres about oral sex into the lyrics of a teenybopper ditty and make a cr
