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Mon propre rôle
En deux volumes, la somme des textes de Gainsbourg. Le premier volume livre des textes surprenants, connus et inconnus. On y suivra toutes les directions de la phrase de Gainsbourg. Des réminiscences de Vian au jeu de mots du jazz, de la période yé-yé, où Gainsbourg signe l'oeuvre à la fois virtuose, parodique et désabusée, à la période pop, où la beauté formelle de l'anglais vient augmenter la phrase française. Un art du rejet, de la distance, un sens du raccourci, un rêve de perfection sonore, qui donneront ses grandes réussites. Jusqu'à cet impartageable ton Gainsbourg, singulier comme une nouvelle esthétique. Le second volume s'ouvre sur les grands exercices formels de Gainsbourg. Plus que jamais, le mot, le rejet et la sonorité sont inextricables. Comme une musique cérébrale. Une esthétique autonome et singulière. Gainsbourg y signe de très grands textes, connus et inconnus, dont ceux de ses meilleures interprètes féminines. Une recueil d'aphorismes et nombre d'inédits nous livrent, au mot pour le mot, la phrase et l'esprit des années 80, grandes années Gainsbourg, celles dont il est l'esthète majeur, incontournable, et où il joue enfin, assume, crée, sans trêve, sans concession, sans limite, son... propre rôle.
- GenresMusic
320 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1991
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 7, 2013
Qui osera donner moins de 5 étoiles pour les paroles des chansons de Serge Gainsbourg?!
June 1, 2025
lo que una se encuentra en el re-read
March 31, 2008
Part two of the great man's lyrics. Basically covers the Bardot/Birkin years to the end. Gainsbourg is such a remarkable and unusual talent. And I use 'is' instead of 'was' even though he's dead, his world and music is very much alive in my life and on this computer this very moment. Essential and one of these days I will do a translated book of his lyrics. One of these days....
February 9, 2026
(Note: Goodreads is apparently incapable of telling the difference between two separate volumes, as it is between a book read, say, in the original French and in translation. Pretty rubbish, but then it's obvious that little if any effort is put into improving the setup. So anyway, all one can do is flag the differences and put two reviews in the same spot.)
Vol. I:
In the short intro, Alain Coelho, who seems to know what he's on about, says of SG that the keystones of his lyric writing are word association, a distant tone and 'rejet'. I suppose this last word is meant in both the sense of rejection and the literary sense of "a poetic device where a word or short phrase, syntactically belonging to the preceding line, is placed at the beginning of the following line." Both senses strikingly apply to these lyrics.
My French is ok, but not good enough to get all SG's words, and many of the lyrics leave me a bit in the dark. But a lot of them are clear enough. I feel that (as Coelho seems to endorse, saying 'le sens pour lui est toujours ponctuel. Il est avant tout musical.. les mots s'echangent, se cherchent, se fondent eux-memes') that often he is mainly using words to make phonetic patterns with some semblance of sense, though sometimes he comes up with something even more memorable (I won't say poetic, not being a big poetry guy).
There are plenty of examples of the primarily pattern-led on 'Rock Around the Bunker': 'Tata teutonne', 'SS si bon' and 'J'entends des voix off' - though the very early 'La javanaise' is another (triumph and) fairly phonetic effort.
A better balance between sound games and semi-sense-making songcraft is found in late sixties smashes such as 'L'anamour' and 'Sous le soleil exactement' (supported by super-sounding ensembles. OK, sorry, I'll stop!); here the patterning applies traditional rhyme-scheming; check out this A-B-B-A from L'anamour: 'J'ai cru entendre les helices / d'un quadrimoteur mais helas / c'est un ventilateur qui passe / au ciel du poste de police'. Does it make sense? Maybe, kind of. Is it a beautiful pop song? No question.
Oh, I was going to expand on the distance and rejection theme: many of these songs deal with ending affairs, reflecting on how glad the singer is to be shot of someone, how boring it is to have someone around when you're not actually making out, and so on. This starts (in the book's sequence anyway) with 'La femme des uns sous le corps des autres', if not already in 'Du jazz dans le ravin', and goes on (and on and on) as far as 'Sensuelle et sans suite' about 15 years later. (The next 2 albums interrupt the theme: 'La homme a tete de chou' tells a story of crazed, homicidal sexual obsession; 'Rock around the bunker' is +/- a joky collection of derisive songs about Nazis.)
Vol II: This one begins with a short interview, which for some reason is undated. It sounds as if it's from close to the end (in 1991).
The lyrics collected, as in the first volume, are presented in partial sort-of-thematic groups: 'Pour Jane', 'Texte pour reggae party', etc., that partly follow the album sequences. There is some album-source overlap between the two, though not much: for the most part, this collection begins, in time terms though not in page of appearance, in 1979 with 'Aux armes etcaetera'.
As for the lyrics themselves, they continue in the vein of the first collection, if anything accentuating the techniques and preoccupations seen before: lots of enjambment, lots of internal rhyme, lots of prioritising sound over sense, often cleverly done and with many fancy words and a lot of chucking in of English into the mix. That said, there are some shifts in tone: post-Birkin, there's often a more pathetico-tragic feel in the words, doomed irrecoverable love, where the earlier Serge would have projected himself as more the smiling worldly cynic. A lot of the songs represented here were performed by others, mostly women: Jane B, Isabelle Adjani, Catherine Deneuve, and daughter Charlotte (maybe Vanessa Paradis too? I didn't check who did what, am relying on memory) - though there are also songs for male singers such as Alains Chamfort and Bashung. If I'm not mistaken, the songs he wrote for Jacques Dutronc are not included here - perhaps they were co-writes, I don't recall.
So his own studio LP releases covered here are just the last 4, the aforementioned 'Aux armes' and its follow-up 'Mauvaises nouvelles des etoiles', then 'Love on the beat' and 'You're under arrest'. These last two do have some well-crafted lyrics (e.g. 'Baille baille Samantha'), but also show an unprecedented coarseness on several numbers that I feel (call me a snowflake) let the side down - the low points probably being 'Suck baby suck', and 'Five easy pisseuses' which half-heartedly apply Gainsbourg's usual word-sound-play to the business of talking smutty in a wilfully (or drunkenly) infantile way. We're talking about the words rather than the music here, but it's hard not to recall how horribly much of these two albums mix corny rahck guitar and clunky post-disco beats.
The songs he wrote for others didn't suffer the same decline, though. I wouldn't say he reached new heights (some might); he just continued to plough more or less the same furrow, or rather modulated it - I know, most people can't modulate furrows - to ventriloquise female characters, who apparently generally have a tragic, heartbreakingly poignant time of it, usually taking a role complementary to that of the male voice in his own songs in their late, hopeless mode.
The book ends with a few alleged 'aphorismes et humeurs', which are frankly not brilliant ("J'arrete de fumer. Toutes les 5 minutes"). The better ones are mostly taken or adapted from the lyrics.
Vol. I:
In the short intro, Alain Coelho, who seems to know what he's on about, says of SG that the keystones of his lyric writing are word association, a distant tone and 'rejet'. I suppose this last word is meant in both the sense of rejection and the literary sense of "a poetic device where a word or short phrase, syntactically belonging to the preceding line, is placed at the beginning of the following line." Both senses strikingly apply to these lyrics.
My French is ok, but not good enough to get all SG's words, and many of the lyrics leave me a bit in the dark. But a lot of them are clear enough. I feel that (as Coelho seems to endorse, saying 'le sens pour lui est toujours ponctuel. Il est avant tout musical.. les mots s'echangent, se cherchent, se fondent eux-memes') that often he is mainly using words to make phonetic patterns with some semblance of sense, though sometimes he comes up with something even more memorable (I won't say poetic, not being a big poetry guy).
There are plenty of examples of the primarily pattern-led on 'Rock Around the Bunker': 'Tata teutonne', 'SS si bon' and 'J'entends des voix off' - though the very early 'La javanaise' is another (triumph and) fairly phonetic effort.
A better balance between sound games and semi-sense-making songcraft is found in late sixties smashes such as 'L'anamour' and 'Sous le soleil exactement' (supported by super-sounding ensembles. OK, sorry, I'll stop!); here the patterning applies traditional rhyme-scheming; check out this A-B-B-A from L'anamour: 'J'ai cru entendre les helices / d'un quadrimoteur mais helas / c'est un ventilateur qui passe / au ciel du poste de police'. Does it make sense? Maybe, kind of. Is it a beautiful pop song? No question.
Oh, I was going to expand on the distance and rejection theme: many of these songs deal with ending affairs, reflecting on how glad the singer is to be shot of someone, how boring it is to have someone around when you're not actually making out, and so on. This starts (in the book's sequence anyway) with 'La femme des uns sous le corps des autres', if not already in 'Du jazz dans le ravin', and goes on (and on and on) as far as 'Sensuelle et sans suite' about 15 years later. (The next 2 albums interrupt the theme: 'La homme a tete de chou' tells a story of crazed, homicidal sexual obsession; 'Rock around the bunker' is +/- a joky collection of derisive songs about Nazis.)
Vol II: This one begins with a short interview, which for some reason is undated. It sounds as if it's from close to the end (in 1991).
The lyrics collected, as in the first volume, are presented in partial sort-of-thematic groups: 'Pour Jane', 'Texte pour reggae party', etc., that partly follow the album sequences. There is some album-source overlap between the two, though not much: for the most part, this collection begins, in time terms though not in page of appearance, in 1979 with 'Aux armes etcaetera'.
As for the lyrics themselves, they continue in the vein of the first collection, if anything accentuating the techniques and preoccupations seen before: lots of enjambment, lots of internal rhyme, lots of prioritising sound over sense, often cleverly done and with many fancy words and a lot of chucking in of English into the mix. That said, there are some shifts in tone: post-Birkin, there's often a more pathetico-tragic feel in the words, doomed irrecoverable love, where the earlier Serge would have projected himself as more the smiling worldly cynic. A lot of the songs represented here were performed by others, mostly women: Jane B, Isabelle Adjani, Catherine Deneuve, and daughter Charlotte (maybe Vanessa Paradis too? I didn't check who did what, am relying on memory) - though there are also songs for male singers such as Alains Chamfort and Bashung. If I'm not mistaken, the songs he wrote for Jacques Dutronc are not included here - perhaps they were co-writes, I don't recall.
So his own studio LP releases covered here are just the last 4, the aforementioned 'Aux armes' and its follow-up 'Mauvaises nouvelles des etoiles', then 'Love on the beat' and 'You're under arrest'. These last two do have some well-crafted lyrics (e.g. 'Baille baille Samantha'), but also show an unprecedented coarseness on several numbers that I feel (call me a snowflake) let the side down - the low points probably being 'Suck baby suck', and 'Five easy pisseuses' which half-heartedly apply Gainsbourg's usual word-sound-play to the business of talking smutty in a wilfully (or drunkenly) infantile way. We're talking about the words rather than the music here, but it's hard not to recall how horribly much of these two albums mix corny rahck guitar and clunky post-disco beats.
The songs he wrote for others didn't suffer the same decline, though. I wouldn't say he reached new heights (some might); he just continued to plough more or less the same furrow, or rather modulated it - I know, most people can't modulate furrows - to ventriloquise female characters, who apparently generally have a tragic, heartbreakingly poignant time of it, usually taking a role complementary to that of the male voice in his own songs in their late, hopeless mode.
The book ends with a few alleged 'aphorismes et humeurs', which are frankly not brilliant ("J'arrete de fumer. Toutes les 5 minutes"). The better ones are mostly taken or adapted from the lyrics.
March 30, 2008
The first volume of a two volume set of the collected lyrics of Serge Gainsbourg. I have his entire catalogue of songs on my computer - because one for my work (publishing a major and huge biography on the man) and two, I think he's great. i don't even read French! But I do go over the text (lyrics) just for the music of the words. He's an remarkable writer - a one-of-a-kind genius in fact.
This first volume covers his jazz and latin period - and for my taste I think this was the best time for his recordings. I love the jazz era and where he came from. Boris Vian (my other hero) was one of the first writers to acknowledge Gainsbourg as a major talent. Something Gainsbourg never forgot. He loved Vian's work.
This first volume covers his jazz and latin period - and for my taste I think this was the best time for his recordings. I love the jazz era and where he came from. Boris Vian (my other hero) was one of the first writers to acknowledge Gainsbourg as a major talent. Something Gainsbourg never forgot. He loved Vian's work.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews