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Best Of - Comme Un Boomerang [Double CD]

Serge Gainsbourg Audio CD
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
Price: £12.04 & this item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions
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Frequently Bought Together

Best Of - Comme Un Boomerang + Gainsbourg [DVD] + Initials SG
Price For All Three: £23.66

Buy the selected items together
  • Gainsbourg [DVD] £6.35
  • Initials SG £5.27

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Product details

  • Audio CD (7 Mar 2011)
  • Number of Discs: 2
  • Format: Double CD
  • Label: Wrasse
  • ASIN: B004NCFUHE
  • Other Editions: Audio CD
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 68,547 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Disc: 1
1. Le Poinçonneur Des Lilas
2. Du Jazz Dans Le Ravin
3. La Recette De L'amour Fou
4. L'eau À La Bouche
5. La Chanson De Prévert
6. Black Trombone
7. Baudelaire
8. Intoxicated Man
9. La Javanaise
10. Chez Les Ye Ye
See all 24 tracks on this disc
Disc: 2
1. L'anamour
2. Sous Le Soleil Exactement
3. Les Sucettes
4. Elisa
5. Ballade De Melody Nelson
6. L'hôtel Particulier
7. La Décadanse
8. Annee Erotique
9. Comme Un Boomerang
10. Rock Around the Bunker
See all 22 tracks on this disc

Product Description

BBC Review

The common difficulty of separating art from artist is especially acute where Serge Gainsbourg is concerned. Especially outside France, he endures largely as an untrumpable cliché of sybaritic French masculinity, far better known for leering at Whitney Houston on a chat show than he is for a vast and important canon of popular song (Gainsbourg himself, it can fairly be understated, rarely sought to downplay his image as an unregenerate boulevardier).

This 47-track retrospective, appearing 20 years after his death, aged 62, persuasively argues that the occlusion of Gainsbourg’s music by Gainsbourg’s personality is a minor outrage. There is a great deal of stunning pop here, clustered on the first of the two discs. Gainsbourg’s swaggering 1960s hits, including Docteur Jekyll et Monsieur Hyde and Qui Est "In" Qui Est "Out", were an under-remarked but significant influence on mid-90s Britpop, especially Pulp, Saint Etienne and Blur at their more stately.

The later songs collected on the second disc are more erratic, but nevertheless compelling. When Gainsbourg embraced self-parody, he did so with characteristic ardour, as on the porn soundtrack sound-alike Sea, Sex and Sun. When he drifted into outright lunacy, he displayed comparable bravado. Among the treasures here is the title-track from his 1975 release Rock Around the Bunker, a deeply peculiar concept album about Nazism on which Gainsbourg concocted camp absurdism from his childhood memories of being Jewish in occupied France.

There is another conventional wisdom about Gainsbourg – that his voice wasn’t up to much, that his greatest moments were those involving his various female muses (Dieu Fumeur De Havanes, with Catherine Deneuve, and his infamous duets with Jane Birkin, are included here). This is also unfair: like his kindred spirits Leonard Cohen and Lee Hazlewood, Gainsbourg found ample room within his limitations, that languid growl secreting deceptive quantities of wit, and even warmth.


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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Great compilation 11 April 2011
Format:Audio CD|Amazon Verified Purchase
After watching Joann Sfar's hugely entertaining 2010 film 'Gainsbourg' I was inspired to delve further into the music, and where better to start than this compilation? I will leave others to argue the merits of what is and isn't included ('Lemon zest' anyone?!), but the sound quality is excellent and especially so considering the age of some of the early tracks. The enclosed booklet is entirely in French so you may have to brush up your schoolbook French like me, but my overall impression is a great selection so you'll never get Serge's catchy tunes out of your head! Great Fun!
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