Secret History of Rock. The Most Influential Bands You've Never Heard by Roni Sarig

alienation of a modern rebel while mixing in enough sex, violence, and social commentary to keep the public captivated. “For me provocation is oxygen,” Serge Gainsbourg once said. For over three decades, Gainsbourg so effectively played the role of bad boy provocateur that by the time he died in 1991 he was regarded as a national treasure.
    Gainsbourg fancied himself an heir to young and restless French poets Baudelaire and Rimbaud – a Dylan of the Left Bank who played the part of both ugly duckling sex symbol and intellectual pop star. At the same time, he was also the archetypal sleazy lounge singer, the stereotypical French smoothie, the aging swinger who beds young models. The renewed interest in all sounds deemed kitschy (cocktail music, easy listening), has led to new notice of Gainsbourg in the English-speaking world. Indeed, his mix of retro sounds and thoroughly ‘90s polemics makes him a perfect antihero for the current revivals.
    Beyond the trends, though, Gainsbourg was in essence a terrific songwriter whose ability to jump between various pop styles makes him an inspiration to modern-day eclectics. His growing influence in U.S. and British pop is implicit in the number of artists covering his material: Luscious Jackson [a version of Gainsbourg’s Soixante-neuf ann é e é rotique (“69 Erotic Year”)], Luna’s Dean Wareham and Stereo lab’s Leticia Sandier ( Bonnie and Clyde ), Free Kitten (featuring members of Pavement and Sonic Youth), and Mick Harvey of Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds (two whole albums of Gainsbourg material translated into English).
    His image as an angry outsider in France was not something Serge Gainsbourg needed to cultivate; it came naturally to him. He was born Lucien Ginzburg in 1928, the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia. As a teen during World War II, his family lived perilously under the Nazi puppet government in northern France and was forced to wear yellow stars, until they escaped to Images in the south. Though he returned to Paris after the war, Gainsbourg remained bitter about his experience, and disillusioned toward his fellow Frenchmen. He developed an arrogance and sense of fatalism about the world, and a keen desire to rebel against the repression he’d experienced under the Nazis. As a young man, he found kindred spirits in the bohemian scene of Monometer, where he played piano in cabarets and studied painting.
    By the late ‘50s, Gainsbourg had given up painting and began to earn attention for his songs, which he and others started performing in Paris clubs. He changed his name officially when he began his recording career in 1958 with the song The Ticket Puncher , a jazz-based character study of the mundane workaday world. Other songs, such as Intoxicated Man , Ce mortel ennui (“This Mortal Boredom”), and Indiff é rent , furthered Gainsbourg’s image as a chronicler of bohemian angst and alienation and he became an antihero in an otherwise genteel French music world. Though his first album, Du chant à la une! , failed to gain much notice in mainstream French pop – which at the time was dominated by the “ye-ye” sound that borrowed heavily from American and British pop – Gainsbourg had become a favorite in the hip world of Paris’ Left Bank.
    Dave Dederer, Presidents of the United States of America
    My wife spent a lot of time in Europe as a kid... , and she bought this set of stuff he did mostly in the ‘50s and early ‘60s, jazz trio with him singing. It’s the most beautifully recorded music. Luscious, just so creamy, it makes you want to climb inside it. That’s inspiring when it’s time to record and you’re trying to think of sounds and ways to invite the listener in.
    In the early ‘60s, Gainsbourg was reaching his mid-30s and was in search of a mainstream breakthrough. While remaining essentially a composer of jazz-pop, Gainsbourg began incorporating into his music the stylish sounds of the Caribbean and South America in songs like Cha