Serge Gainsbourg : trois manières de raconter une histoire érotique

Abstract

Serge Gainsbourg followed all popular musical trends of his time. The phenomenon of the concept album, created by anglophone musicians, is one of them. Three albums of Gainsbourg, Histoire de Melody Nelson (1971), L’Homme à tête de chou (1976) and You’re under arrest (1987) are remarkable examples of erotic storytelling in songs. Each of them tells a story of a sexual  relation to a young girl, with an unhappy ending. However, despite the typical subject, the three albums have completely different moods and rhetorical strategies : innocence and fragility in the first one, tension and violence in the second, and emotional detachment in the third. The present article compares these three Gainsbourg works from literary, musical, vocal and phonographic perspectives in order to show how different aspects of erotic storytelling are articulated by means of a concept album.