Serge Gainsbourg: The Provocateur of French Music
The Ubiquitous Singer/Songwriter Behind "Chez les Yé-Yé" and the Ye-Ye Movement
A lot has ben written about Serge Gainsbourg, so I won’t be covering him too much, but he was a force within French pop music, and defied conventions through his entire career. From his early days blending jazz and chanson to experimenting with reggae (Gainsbourg may have had the first reggae hit in France, regrettably) and pop, Gainsbourg’s career was innovative and controversial, all the while following or defining trends that would define pop music.
The video's amazing dancer, Pierre Cassel, is also the father of actor Vincent Cassel.
Chez Yé-yé Serge Gainsbourg (1964)
His 1964 "Chez les Yé-Yé" bridges the counterculture of the Ye-Ye movement his own sophisticated style, a stripped-down, jazzy sound and lyrics that raised eyebrows even in the 1960s. It was a moment in his career, as he was a known, but not yet the cultural icon he’d become after his later work with Brigitte Bardot.
I love this song and this video.
K
The album, Gainsbourg Confidentiel was a stripped-down sound, highlighting his jazz influences with minimal instrumentation, setting him apart from the more commercial pop scene of the time. It was this style that came to define much of his early music and it’s well worth a listen.
Yé-yé is French for yeah yeah
The Ye-Ye movement in France was basically a beatnik and hipster movement, & not loved by everyone. “Ye-Ye” in French, sounds like “Yeah Yeah” in English, so that’s where that came from. It’s been a hugely important movement in French pop, basically taking anglophone music and making it distinctively French.
(some of the) controversies
Gainsbourg had a gift for offending people, but seemed to do it a bit artfully, at least.
He was always controversial, but always popular. Some of the lines about "saving his Lolita" in these lyrics probably would not go over well today, if they were in English. He has a few others songs where he sings about underage girls and a suggestive song about lollipops that was banned in multiple countries.
Gainsbourg’s 1969 Je t’aime… moi non plus is one of the most controversial and iconic songs in French pop history. Sung as a breathy duet with Jane Birkin, the track is famous for its explicit sensuality and simulated orgasm sounds, which led to bans in several countries.
The title, which translates as “I love you… me neither,” captures the song’s contradiction— emotional detachment in the midst of, well, physical intimacy. Rather than romance, it is cool, mechanical, and ambivalent.
Je t’aime… moi non plus was one of the first international hits to present overtly sexual content without metaphor, the song was hailed by some as bold and artistic, and condemned by others as pornographic. The London Observer said it was Emmanuelle as a song. Gainsbourg described it not as erotic, but as “an anti-fuck song,” challenging moral norms and sentimental clichés of the time.
It’s hard to imagine a song like this making waves today, in a post-Get Low era (if we can say that), and after decades of far more explicit music, but it caused a lot of problems for him.