“Lost Song”: Serge Gainsbourg and the transformation of French popular music
Résumé
This chapter addresses Serge Gainsbourg’s epitomizing the shift from chanson française to French popular music (that is, the shift from ”popular music in the Francophone sense of the term” to “popular music in the Anglophone sense of the term”). The author first puts both categories in perspective, contrasting the long-established Gallic emphasis on high culture (and, more particularly, French songwriters’ traditional quest for what David Looseley calls “para-literary legitimacy”) with a more conversational and functional approach to lyric writing. Then he examines Gainsbourg’s position in the history of French popular culture by presenting him as the last singer-songwriter in a long series of local artists whose practice and cultural background made them not poets of their own, but actual mediators between the high-culture world of poetry and mass audiences. Finally, he argues that “the man with the cabbage head” signalled, at the same time, the end of a certain idea of chanson française and the beginning of French popular music by combining a quasi obsession with the most classic forms of poetry and technical aspects of versification with a then-not-so-common ability to immerse himself in the latest sonic trends from the English-speaking world.