Unsung Heroes #2
It may be a reach classifying someone buried in Paris’ prestigious Montparnesse Cemetery as being “unsung” but that I was unaware of Serge Gainsbourg’s stature until two months ago is stupefying to me. I discovered him because of a recommended bio-flick. I was told he looked like a scruffier Shane MacGowan (he does) and that was enough to make interested in director Joann Sfar’s Gainsbourg, which I give three stars, but, more importantly, give it credit for making me check out the man’s work, much of it as innovative as it is provocative.
For example, Je t’aime … moi non plus’ (‘I Love You … Me Neither) - his duet with British model (and future wife) Jane Birkin amid Procol Harum-ish keyboards– scandalized Europe and was banned in Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom for its sexy moans and groans in 1968, seven years before Donna Summer moaned and groaned her way to disco stardom with ‘Love To Love You’. (And recently used by Sofia Coppola in Natalie Portman’s ad for Miss Dior Cherie Perfume).
As a another example, I give you Rock Around The Bunker, a 1975 concept album about Nazis and World War II that had to have influenced Malcolm McLaren’s nurturing of Nazi imagery in Sex Pistols songs and persona. Remember ‘Belsen Was A Gas’? Remember Sid Vicious’ swastika shirt?
I could go on and on. I hear him in Barry White. I hear him in The Specials. I hear him in Beck. You know Lou Reed’s talking vocal style that everybody thinks Lou invented? Uh-uh. Gainsbourg was doing it back when Lou Reed was still setting his sights on being an occupant of the Brill Building. At the beginning of his career – if he had been American – Gainsbourg would’ve been working in that mid-Manhattan building with Neil Diamond, Neil Sedaka, and Burt Bacharach, to name songwriters who - like Gainsbourg - went on to be singing stars themselves.
Because that’s how Gainsbourg started out: as a writer of songs. I love his life story. Self-destructive creative people are fascinating: the dichotomy is breathtaking. Just about the only artist type I like better are late bloomers such as German author Theodor Fontane, who published his first novel at the age of 60. In Gainsbourg, I have both since he didn’t release his first album until he was 30, having previously failed at painting.
Gainsbourg’s earliest work is indebted to chanson, a type of French song that is lyric driven, but what differentiates his work from other singers specializing in this genre – such as Edith Piaf – is the space given to the instrumentation. Gainsbourg will step aside and let the organist, pianist, guitarist play. (His songs are marvels of arrangement (for which some credit must go to Alain Goraguer, Arthur Greenslade, and Alan Hawkshaw, the principal arrangers of his hit singles). For example, ‘Intoxicated Man’ is organ driven – it either influenced Hendry Mancini’s writing of ‘The Pink Panther Theme’ or vice versa – and Gainsbourg just disappears so the top-notch organist can solo.
Researching ‘Intoxicated Man’ led me to a Mick Harvey CD with the same title whose artwork I remembered. I remembered thinking of buying it back in 1995 and so it turns that I I had heard of Gainsbourg before. Harvey was a member of Birthday Party (a band that’s never gotten it’s true due), a Bad Seed, and a P. J. Harvey cohort and on his album he covered 16 of Gainsbourg’s songs. Reading the track listing, I could see why I had heard good things about it. Many of Gainsbourg’s best singles are covered (only with English lyrics), singles such as ‘Initial B.B.’, ‘Bonnie and Clyde’, and ‘Lemon Incest’, the song Gainsbourg – always one for pushing society’s prudish buttons – dueted on with his daughter Charlotte, a popular singer in France in her own right.
That’s part of the secret of Gainsbourg’s success: duets or female harmonies for the choruses. ‘Initials B.B.’ refer to French actress Brigitte Bardot with whom Gainsbourg had a fling: brief but long enough for her to sing on his 1968 hit ‘Bonnie and Clyde’. (Gainsbourg lyrically has a thing for American pop culture and in his songs you’ll find references to New York USA, Ford Mustangs, comic strips and et cetera.) Bardot also did the original moaning and groaning on ‘Je t’aime moi non plus’ but by the time Gainsbourg wanted to release the track, she had abandoned her inner Bonnie Parker and had returned to her husband and respectability and would not allow Gainsbourg to use her contributions to the original sessions. In walked Jane Birkin – who said she spent her first night with Gainsbourg in a night club then a transvestite club then Gainbourg’s hotel room, an evening that is depicted in Gainsbourg. Birkin overdubbed new moans and groans and went on to be featured on other Gainsbourg recordings, including Historie de Melody Nelson, a concept album that some consider Gainsbourg’s finest.
Gainsbourg continued courting controversy over the last 15 years of his life. Veterans of the Algerian War protested when he recorded the reggae flavored ‘Aux Armes et Caetera’, which they thought showed disrespect to the French national anthem. Bob Marley was pissed off at Gainsbourg for having his wife Rita singing erotic lyrics on another track. (I find this surprising because Gainsbourg and his material reeks of sex, so what did Marley expect? Even in photos of Gainsbourg if he’s not smoking, he’s standing near a woman in a scattered state of undress.) In 1986, he told Whitney Houston “I want to fuck you!” when the two met on a television show and the host Michael Drucker would not translate what he was saying in French. Like I’ve pointed out, Gainsbourg may have been French, but he knew his English well enough.
But that’s unimportant now. We can’t let these controversies detract from Gainsbourg’s contributions to pop music, especially his playfulness as a singer, lyricist and songwriter. What is important now is the music that remains twenty years after he died: songs written for other singers, hit singles, concept albums, 40 film soundtracks. I suggest you check some of them out because his work touches so many genres – jazz, ballads, mambo, lounge, reggae, pop (including adult contemporary pop, kitsch pop, yé-yé pop, '80s pop, pop-art pop, prog pop, space-age pop, psychedelic pop, and erotic pop), disco, calypso, Africana, bossa nova, and rock and roll according to Wiki – there’s bound to be something you’ll that’ll appeal to your French side.
