VARIOUS ARTISTS
Monsieur Gainsbourg Revisited
Verve
JANE BIRKIN
Fictions
Capitol
· Figuring out the equation between Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin – tribute album fails to recapture cleverness of originals, while Birkin engages with her intelligent musical offering.
Serge Gainsbourg has been appreciated in France for decades as a master songwriter and pop culture provocateur. But his popularity is far more recent in the English-speaking world, where he is chiefly revered for talking dirty with style and dignity, which is not quite the same thing.
The covers and tribute albums have proliferated, with this one being neither the best nor the worst of the lot. The strong point of the collection is the diversity of participants, who span three generations of (mostly) U.K. pop stars, from Marianne Faithful to Cat Power, and Michael Stipe to Franz Ferdinand (and, as per usual, Feist). Despite all the steadily diminishing returns this implies, it forces some variety on an otherwise uninspired production.
The main problem is the translation, which doesn’t just fail to recapture the ruthless cleverness of the originals, but is outright clumsy – poorly worded and out of rhythm.
A close second is the interpreters’ attitude, which can be summed up as, "Serge is cool, we’re cool, no sweat." While no one expects creativity from The Rakes, The Kills or Franz Ferdinand, others clearly could have made an effort (and have done so elsewhere).
Only two duets truly capture the spirit of the Gainsbourg, Cat Power with Karen Elson, and Feist with (’70s pop starlet) Dani (though the latter is marred by an ill-advised rap intrusion from Gonzales). Stipe, Faithful, Carla Bruni, Portishead, and Tricky don’t make complete fools of themselves, but that’s the best one can say.
Still, Gainsbourg’s musical genius has survived worse handling and if you’re under 25 years of age, this should provide a safe enough introduction to one aspect of the man’s heritage.
Jane Birkin is an important part of another aspect – a modernization of the relationship between male songwriter and female muse and singer. The songs he wrote for her are not just among the best of his career, they are also the most honest, as he found it easier to have her speak of his weaknesses and failures than to tell of them himself.
But, it was only after his death that she really came into her own, first through a systematic and imaginative reworking of his originals and then through a series of increasingly adventurous collaborations with the best of a new generation of songwriters. Fictions is the third in that series, and it’s an engagingly intelligent effort, let down only by clunking production from the usually deft Gonzales (and what’s Johnny Marr doing here?).
Had it not been preceded by a genuine classic, Fictions’s many qualities would be more obvious. The contributions (from the Divine Comedy, Beth Gibbons, Rufus Wainright and others) may not be the best any of them has written, but none is a throwaway, and the arbitrariness of this collection provides Birkin with an interesting challenge in unifying them with her severely limited (but ever charming) voice. But what should have been the best track here, "Plus d’Hiver," was released last summer instead, on Yann Tiersen’s Les Retrouvailles.
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