Serge Gainsbourg - Rock Around The Bunker

Jawohl!
(Special Gift für Hilts)

Yet another one of Serge's many finest moments,
this here little re-imagined nostalgia trip-slash-ode
he produced to conjure his fondly Nazi-riddled youth.

The titles are tantalizing enough:

1. "Nazi Rock"
2. "Tata Teutonne"
3. "J'Entends des Voix Off"
4. "Eva"
5. "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes"
6. "Zig Zag Avec Toi"
7. "Est-Ce Si Bon?"
8. "Yellow Star"
9. "Rock Around the Bunker"
10. "S.S. in Uruguay"

But don't let that stop you!

Guitars by Alan Parker ("Hurdy Gurdy Man")
Backing Vocals by Clare Torry ("Great Gig in the Sky")

Wiki summarizes like so: a 1975 album by French singer and songwriter Serge Gainsbourg, containing songs which combined pseudo-1950s musical arrangements in the manner of Grease or The Rocky Horror Show with lyrics relating to Nazi Germany and World War II, complete with Gainsbourg's usual sex and scatology.

As a young Jewish teenager in occupied France, Gainsbourg was forced to hide from the Nazi and Vichy authorities; Rock Around The Bunker was all the more controversial in a country that has had a long period of coming to grips with its role in World War II.

Songs like "Nazi Rock", "Tata Teutonne" and "SS in Uruguay" further established Gainsbourg's role as France's resident pop provocateur, and was contemporary with David Bowie's similar Nazi obsession.

OR See Allmusic's more nuanced take here.

The opening lines to album opener "Nazi Rock"
invokes The Night of The Long Knives
(wheee!):


Voici venir la nuit des longs couteaux,
Enfilez vos bas noirs les gars,

Ajustez bien vos acroches-bas,

Vos porte-jartelles et vos corsets,

Allez venez ca va se corser,

On va danser le Nazi Rock!

Hören Sie!

(props: audiofile cribbed from this here fun little industrial musicblog)

Serge Gainsbourg - Aux Armes Et Caetera

Rocky says: Freggae Supreme! 1979. Serge is looking for a new sound. So he heads down to Jamaica, to make his own contribution to the locally-grown craze that's taking the world by storm. He hooks up with Marley's backing band and singers, all legendary players in their own right.

So Wrong it's Right. The bio account (cf. Sylvie Simmons book) tells a tale of a strange intersection of cultures: the band be toking while Serge politely demurs in favor of his lounge lizard scotch. The band eying this curious louche Frenchman with puzzlement. The I-Threes singing the refrain to "Lola Rastaquouère" entirely unaware that Serge is telling a story about rolling his "poor joint" between a bodacious Jamaican teen's tits.

Pure Jamaican Gold. And the result is a pristine groove masterpiece that hasn't aged a day. They took it on the road for awhile, but the title hit tune, which made yawning mockery of the bloodthirsty French national anthem ("To arms! whatever..."), so infuriated the French veterans that there were riots and bomb threats and the bewildered band quickly scurried back to Jamaica. Oh. Dear Lord, but how I so love this record!

allmusic: This is one messed-up set. Dig the fact that this is Serge Gainsbourg in dread beat and booze. Aux Armes et Cætera is literally Gainsbourg on the rocksteady tip with Sly and Robbie, Flabba Holt, Michael "Mao" Chung, Ansel Collins, I-Threes, Rita Marley, Marcia Griffiths, and Judy Mowatt, Sticky Thompson, Leroy "Horsemouth" Wallace, and a bunch of French folks playing puff-the-ganja and help the white man in Kingston. Gainsbourg knew what he wanted — a Lee Perry-styled dubber and dread outing — and he knew the cats to hire to get it. It contains 15 cuts; some, such as "Javanaise," are remakes, while others, ("Des Laids, Des Laids") were written for the session.

The Jamaican studio musicians are solid, rocking it down the pipe dark, smoky, and deadly in their grooves. While Serge would seemingly be at a creative impasse, having been one of the whitest men ever to record a side, his tunes work here because he's allowed them to be completely transformed by the Rastas, and his vocals work because they are chanted [rapped] rather than sung. This is weird, dangerous, and campy music, but it works like a charm. In its day this album was reviled: now it's the work of a visionary. Go figure, but if you dig Gainsbourg, this is for you.

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Serge Gainsbourg - Comic Strip

If I had any less sense about me I just might worship this letch, emulate him. Thank God I'm a guilt-ridden WASP with a crushing Protestant work ethic and an impenetrable morality that disallows even the slightest transgression against my neighbor. But it's fun to dream. Merci Serge!

_____________________

Serge Gainsbourg was the dirty old man of popular music; a French singer/songwriter and provocateur notorious for his voracious appetite for alcohol, cigarettes, and women, his scandalous, taboo-shattering output made him a legend in Europe but only a cult figure in America, where his lone hit "Je T'Aime...Moi Non Plus" stalled on the pop charts — fittingly enough — at number 69.

Serge Gainsbourg's remarkable pop hits are best represented on Comic Strip, an indispensable set collecting 20 tracks recorded between 1966 and 1969. In addition to the lushly erotic "Je T'Aime...Moi Non Plus" — Gainsbourg's best-known record — Comic Strip includes the title track and "Bonnie and Clyde," his collaborations with Brigitte Bardot, as well as "Initials B.B.," a sweeping paean to his duet partner, "the most beautiful woman on earth." Other highlights include "Chatterton" (a bouncy celebration of suicide), "Torrey Canyon" (a prescient warning against threats to the environment), and the self-explanatory "Soixante Neuf Année Érotique" ("69 Erotic Year").

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