Cheap L'Homme a Tete De Chou Vol.7 (Music) (Serge Gainsbourg) Price

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Customer Reviews of L'Homme a Tete De Chou Vol.7

Storytelling with minimal instrumental backing
Five years after the masterpiece "Histoire de Melody Nelson", Serge Gainsbourg recorded another concept album. Like on "Melody Nelson", most songs on "L'homme à tête de chou" are spoken storytelling with instrumental accompaniment. On "Melody Nelson" the instrumental parts were played by an orchestra and a rock band but on this album it's a band alone. The music is even more minimalistic than on "Melody Nelson" though there are a few dramatic parts. At first I thought that this album isn't even real music, just storytelling with some instrumental backing. And I thought that it would be completely impossible to listen to for somebody who doesn't speak French. But after listening to it for a few times, I realized I had been wrong. The music may be extremely minimalistic but it's definitely good music. And there are a few songs with sung vocals, most notably "Marilou sous la neige" (Marilou Under the Snow). My French isn't perfect so there's a lot in the lyrics that I don't understad. But despite this, it's not hard to see that "L'homme à tête de chou" is a masterpiece.

There are also a lot of bonus tracks on this cd release. "L'ami caouette" is a lot of fun. And so is "Sea, Sex and Sun", a disco song which is probably meant to be self-parody. The English version is even funnier in all its sleaziness. "Good-Bye Emmanuelle" is from an erotic movie with the same title, perhaps not Gainsbourg at his best. "Le Cadavre Exquis" and "My Lady Heroine" are a lot better. In the end of the cd there are two excellent songs are from an album that Gainsbourg wrote for Catherine Deneuve. "Ces petits ries" was actually written already 15 years earlier. A very different version of it can be found from the album Percussions.

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a masterpiece
This album is a masterpeice for several reasons:
1) it is a full-blown rock opera, with a beginning, an apogee, and an end.
2) it uses "broken rhymes", which Gainsbourg invented with this album, and are now used by 1000s of artists.
3) the music is excellent, and very forward-thinking for the time
4) the lyrics are a poetic bliss (if you speak French, that is) - maybe Giansbourg's best poetry.

Just to clarify one thing: the review currently listed as the only review of this album says that Gainsbourg talks about a man masturbating. It's absolutely false. The storyline is in fact quite different: it's about Gainsbar falling fatally in love with Marilou, his hairdresser. There is a song in the middle where Marilou plays with herself and falls into "les malices de sa paire de Lewis". Gainsbourg then kills Marilou out of paranoid jaleousy, and finishes by going insane, his head symbolically transformed into a cabbage.

The lyrics explore the relationship of passion , lust and destruction, this with the satirical humour of master Gainsbar. l'homme a tete de chou is in fact the maturation of Gainsbourg's first rock-opera on a similar topic: Melody Nelson.

As usual with Gainsbourg, the music, however great it might be, is written to support and build the poetry of the texts. Not the opposite. This doesn't diminish the music. On the contrary, it gives it meaning. It forces gainsbourg to mastermind poetry and sound created for one another.

It's frustrating to see people listen to this album without speaking French. May it motivate you to dig into the language.

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Weird ...but great!
This is possibly one of the weirdest records serge, or anyone put out in the 70's... this is basically serge teamed up with his illustrious co-conspirator Alan Hawkshaw (who put out some incredibly hard funkin soundtrack work at around this time)... Anyhow this is a really weird combination of vaguely progish synths and electric pianos mixed in with serge's incredibly loud spoken word parts... not really songs so much as little vignettes or chapters telling the story ... which basically amounts to a man who masturbates so much his brain turns to lettuce... what a premise! and this is the music to get that story acros! ... completely wacked out sounds, crazy mixes, bizarre bizarre bizarre... not really funky just plain wacked... not the best place for a Serge beginer but if you already dig him you need this masterpice of a record... the recent french remasters sound incredible and are well worth tracking down...