Swing Troubadours: Brassens, Vian, Gainsbourg: les Trente Glorieuses en 33 tours (French Edition)

This study focuses on three singer-songwriters of French popular music who emerged in the 1950s: Georges Brassens, Serge Gainsbourg, and Boris Vian. Combining a literary and socio-historical approach of texts and contexts, Olivier Bourderionnet examines the concept of 'chanson' as a vibrant testimony to cultural shifts within French society in the second half of the twentieth century. The author also considers popular song as a new form of orality in French poetry while examining the post-surrealist blurring of frontiers between chanson and poetry in the effervescent and jazz-infused decades that followed World War II. He argues that this period points towards a liberation of language as well as to a changing conception of 'literarity' at a time when the State is taking on the task of generalizing access to culture. As a significant element in the cultural landscape of the era, 'la chanson poetique' effectively mediated public awareness and progressive political concepts to create a subversive space that successfully challenged established institutions and the power they wielded.