"God is a smoker of Havanas," Gainsbourg used to say, excusing himself for the deadly habit that turned his voice into a raspy growl. Serge Gainsbourg somehow made everything seem cool, even smoking. Gainsbourg, the child of Russian Jewish Émigrés, was...
[more]"God is a smoker of Havanas," Gainsbourg used to say, excusing himself for the deadly habit that turned his voice into a raspy growl. Serge Gainsbourg somehow made everything seem cool, even smoking. Gainsbourg, the child of Russian Jewish Émigrés, was celebrated and reviled as much for his raunchy provocations as for 30 years of pop-musical experimentations. At the top of his game from the '60s straight through to the '80s, he combined in his single frame the filthy mouth of Bukowski, the lyrical brilliance of Dylan, and the pure and charismatic sexiness of France herself.
His one and only international pop hit typified his capacity to use music to excite outrage. "Je t'aime moi non plus" would have ruined an artist less committed to scandal. The song was inspired by an affair with the sexy Brigitte Bardot -- when it hit the airwaves in 1969, it not only created erotic static across the globe but also censorious protest from no less than the Pope. This was exactly what Gainsbourg wanted. "For me provocation is oxygen," he said often. He was famous for things like singing with his actress daughter about incest, setting the hallowed French national anthem to a reggae beat, and telling Whitney Houston in front of a TV audience, "I want to fuck you."
Besides audacity, vulgarity, and an iconical status among the French, Gainsbourg is remembered for the way he messed with musical genres. His combinations of rock, pop, rap, and electro-pop are too odd to sound derivative. He'd mix rock guitar and what one critic called "the inescapable tar-pit crawl of the bass" with syrupy violins. He'd turn his voice into a slow-mo cuckoo bird caught inside a metronome, and somehow still sounded sexy and tragic while singing of Bonnie and Clyde.
The weirdness of his pop music very well might stem from his influences -- not just the American jazz of Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, and Art Tatum he heard in the dives of Paris' Pigalle, but the Symbolist poets he read as a youth. Gainsbourg often expressed in music the world-weary decadence and drug-induced surrealism of such nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century French poets as Nerval, Rimbaud, and Baudelaire.
The stance of these writers has never translated easily into American terms. Perhaps this explains why Gainsbourg failed to catch on in the States. Apart from the steamy "Je t'aime moi non plus," he never had an American hit. But in France, where philosophers, poets, writers, and painters are treated as monuments to national identity, Serge Gainsbourg has a pantheon to himself. At his death in 1991, the country mourned as publically and loudly as they had for Edith Piaf. His vocal growls, his lyrical stabs, his own physical abuse have lived on in French culture while the star up there in Heaven smokes his fat cigars.
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