Serge Gainsbourg

The great French pop provocateur Serge Gainsbourg's thirty-year-plus career -- or at least the early part of it -- has been boiled down to three themed compilations for American listeners. Comic Strip is the essential introduction to his deliriously inventive late-'60s hits: lush, witty, campy, and throbbing with the kind of irresistible erotic charisma that only truly ugly people can pull off. "Je T'Aime . . . Moi Non Plus" ("I Love You . . . Me Neither"), his heavy-breathing duet with Jane Birkin, has become audio shorthand for Euro-sleaze. It's amazing how timeless a lot of this stuff sounds: "Requiem Pour un Con," released in 1968, could pass for mid-'90s trip-hop.

The other two comps are for confirmed Gainsbourg fiends only. Du Jazz dans le Ravin surveys decent but not particularly inspired jazz-influenced material from the late '50s and early '60s. Couleur Cafecollects his experiments with African and Latin rhythms, including most of 1964's Gainsbourg Percussions album (notably the delightful "Pauvre Lola"). Gainsbourg's deeply improbable 1979 album, Aux Armes et Caetera, found him in Jamaica, rasping through reggae versions of "La Marseillaise" (the title track), the early jazz standard "You Rascal You" ("Vielle Canaille"), and a bunch of his own songs, with a band that included Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare. Even more improbably, it's terrific, and the 2004 reissue (which appends a disc of dubs and newly recorded DJ versions) is doubly entertaining.

Note: Most Gainsbourg is much more fun if you know enough French to understand his legendary and largely untranslatable wordplay. (DOUGLAS WOLK)

From 2004's The New Rolling Stone Album Guide