Swing Troubadours: Brassens, Vian, Gainsbourg. Les Trente Glorieuses en 33 tours Par Olivier Bourderionnet (review)

This unusual volume, published in French in the United States, attempts to reconfigure the canon of French popular singer-songwriters of the post-Liberation years away from the received ‘gold standard’ represented by Georges Brassens, Léo Ferré, and Jacques Brel, and replacing it with an alternative list of Brassens, Boris Vian, and Serge Gainsbourg. The justification for this lies in these three artists’ assimilation of the jazz aesthetic inaugurated by Charles Trenet and embodied in his 1941 song ‘Swing Troubadour’, the title of which encapsulates his innovative blending of the French poetic heritage with North American jazz rhythms. Olivier Bourderionnet explores this idea through close analysis of the lyrics of his three alternative candidates, and in particular their use of syncopated rhythms as well as jazz-based musical harmonies. The argument is revealing but in the end unconvincing: jazz influences are just one element in the blend of musical influences deployed even by the alternative canonical figures he examines. Brassens is at least as indebted to French folk song melodies and their narrative conventions as to jazz; Vian is as happy using traditional French dance rhythms such as the java or the bourrée as those of the jazz of his youth, as in two well-known titles from his one solo album of songs, ‘La Java des bombes atomiques’ and ‘Bourrée de complexes’; and Gainsbourg’s ironic borrowings from classical music are much more obvious than his debt to jazz. As for the two marginalized figures, Brel and Ferré, both freely acknowledge their debt to Charles Trenet and are quite capable of adopting jazz styles in songs such as ‘Les Paumés du petit matin’ or ‘Dieu est nègre’, but their musical preferences are much more oriented towards the assimilation of classical music. What they all have in common, however, is the attempt to appropriate and adapt the literary models of French poetry to the privileged form of expression of the modern audio-visual media — the popular song. In its second half, Bourderionnet’s study veers away from such aesthetic discussions to examine the ways in which his three major figures reflect and even influence to some extent the evolution of attitudes and social values during the three economically prosperous and politically disastrous decades after the Liberation. Brassens’s attack on capital punishment in ‘Le Gorille’, Vian’s rejection of military conscription in ‘Le Déserteur’, and Gainsbourg’s cynical eroticism: all reflect the ‘Make love not war’ mantra of the late sixties and may have contributed to the creation of a climate of permissiveness that culminated in the student revolt of May 1968. However broadly persuasive, this is a difficult point to demonstrate without a more thoroughgoing and detailed study, which is beyond the scope of such a short monograph, and it is not helped by a tentative claim that the unashamed machismo of these figures might somehow have advanced the cause of women’s liberation. Even so, Swing Troubadours offers a stimulating discussion and the earlier detailed poetic analyses of song lyrics prove rich and rewarding.