My
first encounter with the music of Serge Gainsbourg happened about a year ago
while sitting in a bourgie little café in one of the more chic neighborhoods of
Santiago, Chile. This café had a tendency of playing the same loop of easy
listening music on repeat — given how often and for how long I would find
myself frequenting the establishment to catch up on homework or writing, I grew
accustomed to drowning out the seemingly bland playlist with my own music. One
day, however, before I could put on my headphones, my ears perked up at the
sound of a jaunty organ opening and a breathy falsetto declaring "je
t'aime, je t'aime" over and over again. Now I only know enough French to
earn a few bemused looks from a native speaker at best, but from the first few
verses I already knew this song was something else. The lead male singer was
practically growling into the mic, whispering half-spoken, half-sung little
nothings that only could have meant one thing for his female counterpart. And
then, much like the patrons at the Parisian café that received the distinct
honor of being the first audience to hear "Je t'aime...moi non plus" (I love you...me neither), I put down my coffee cup in astonishment at the
sound of what can only be described as a woman having a very convincing orgasm
(real or fake, the world will never know).
What
in God's name had I just heard? I quickly discovered the song was one of the
most well-known French language songs by perhaps the greatest French musician
to date: Serge Gainsbourg. It turns out that, similar to other non-French
speakers, I discovered Gainsbourg through the shock of the new of "Je
t'aime" and went from there. I was immediately struck by just how prolific
of a musician, artist, and creator this self-proclaimed ugly, misanthropic
lothario turned out to be. This wasn't your grandmother's French chanson
heartthrob: this guy was making lyrical innuendos, wooing one "it
girl" after the other, self-medicating heart attacks with a steady diet of
cigarettes and alcohol, and generally making an ass of himself left and right
until the day he died.
Despite
being one of the most polemic figures in French culture, no one can deny that
Gainsbourg was anything less than a genius when it came to creating new and unexpected
musical endeavors. Be it jazzy chanson (French pop) songs about suicidal train station ticket attendants, scandalous Eurovision entries about
"lollipops,” seductive duets with his bombshell muses, a rock and roll
album about the Nazis, or even a reggae version of the French national anthem,
Gainsbourg was a seemingly endless well of creative energy; he wrote over 550
songs over the span of his career. While you don’t need to know French to
appreciate his genius, any francophile will tell you that one of the most
enduring and impressive aspects of Gainsbourg’s music is his clever yet almost
subversive wordplay. His mastery of puns, innuendo, rhyme, and wit only adds to
the charm of the already innovative instrumentals. Much like Picasso or Stravinsky,
just as he created a new trend, he was already off cooking up another shock-wave. As Howard Gardner describes, artists like these consistently create innovation
after innovation while always alluding (albeit in an original and
distinct way) to earlier artistic milestones of previous generations (10).
But
for me (as well as many music critics), Gainsbourg's magnum opus is the 1971 concept
album Histoire de Melody Nelson. At only 28 minutes, the story focuses on
the narrator (Gainsbourg) falling in love with a young English teenager named
Melody Nelson (Jane Birkin, Gainsbourg’s most famous lover) after accidentally
hitting her with his Rolls Royce. Their Nabakov-style romance ends, however,
when Melody dies in a freak plane crash brought on by a mysterious cult. The
music is ahead of its time in its fusion of funk, gorgeous orchestration and
choral arrangements by Jean-Claude Vannier, and a formidable, near spoken-word
performance by Gainsbourg. The accompanying music video is the perfect example
of early 1970s France: psychedelic, artistic, perverse, groovy, and
inexplicably cool all at once. The legacy of the album lives on — the first
sign of its influence is heard in the bassline of Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side,” and other musicians picked up bits and pieces of its style as time went
on.
The
only way I can describe listening/watching the album unfold is by comparing it
to the first time I saw the original Nijinsky choreography to Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring. There
was something so inherently weird, if not outright sick, about the whole
ordeal, yet something about it was so intriguing that I couldn't help but grow
to love it with each subsequent listen (nota bene: do not watch either work right before bed — you will probably have some very trippy, if not downright alarming, dreams).
When
Gainsbourg died in 1991, then French President François Mitterrand declared, “he was our Baudelaire, our Apollinaire… He elevated the song to a level of
art.” Despite the tendency for some to write him off as a dirty old drunken
cynic, I think it’s safe to say that his true legacy as a champion of “the
shock of the new” will live on every time some unsuspecting listener has to put
down their coffee cup in disturbed fascination. As he put it, “ugliness is in a
way superior to beauty because it lasts.”
Sources:
Gardner, Howard. "Chance Encounters in Wartime Zurich. Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity Seen through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi. New York: Basic, 1993. 10. Print.
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