Serge Gainsbourg — Music Videos

A songwriter with a changing musical language

Serge Gainsbourg was a French singer, songwriter and composer whose recorded work moved from jazz-inflected song toward pop, orchestral rock, funk and reggae. Born Lucien Ginsburg, he developed a distinctive vocal presence that often sounded closer to speech than conventional show singing. His attention to the sound and ambiguity of words made him an influential writer for other performers as well as a recognizable recording artist in his own right.

The early songs

Le poinçonneur des Lilas, released in 1958, introduces the young Gainsbourg through a sharply drawn character and a brisk, detailed arrangement. La Javanaise belongs to a more intimate side of his early repertoire. His original recording was issued in 1963, and its graceful melody and careful verbal rhythm show how much expression he could achieve without a large vocal gesture. These recordings provide a useful starting point before the stylistic turns of the following decades.

Beyond a single genre

Gainsbourg wrote for artists including Juliette Gréco, France Gall, Brigitte Bardot and Jane Birkin, adapting his ideas to different voices and musical settings. Albums such as Histoire de Melody Nelson in 1971 developed an especially close relationship between narration, bass lines and orchestration. His catalog is therefore better approached as a sequence of experiments than as one stable sound: the connecting thread is the songwriter’s ear for phrasing, atmosphere and the dramatic possibilities of a lyric.