Serge Gainsbourg

[I. Spaceman]

Disc 9 is the complete Anna/Je T'aime soundtracks.

[Jason]

Yeah I figured that was the case. But what about those other soundtracks? Amazon doesn't seem to have them, except Cannabis. Do I have to go to another website?

[I. Spaceman]

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0000AQJPI/202-4639282-4471015

[Jason]

That's for Cannabis, I've ordered that.

[I. Spaceman]

Look at the Serge section there, you'll find a lot of goodies.

[Jason]

Funny, my first introduction to Serge was that Love and the Beat series.....what a lousy compilation, now in retrospect. Doesn't even cover his reggae material.

[Jason]

L' Homme À Tête de Chou....I still don't know what to think about this album. It's definitely Serge's darkest work.

[Jason]

BUMP!

Serge's thread is still too good to hit bottom!

[I. Spaceman]

Serge is all about hitting bottom.

[Jason]

Good point. Nazi Rock, anybody?

[I. Spaceman]

Love on the Beat
Serge Gainsbourg: A Fistful of Gitanes by Sylvie Simmons

by Mary Jacobi
November 13 - 19, 2002 
 
Serge Gainsbourg once described "Je T'Aime, Moi Non Plus" (I Love You, Me Neither), his orgasmic 1969 duet with Jane Birkin, as a "chanson anti-baise"—an anti-f*** song. Such contradictions abound in Sylvie Simmons's sympathetic if skin-deep biography of the singer, songwriter, actor, screenwriter, and novelist. Born Lucien Ginsburg in Paris to Russian Jews, forced to wear a yellow star in 1942 (a period revisited on his 1975 album Rock Around the Bunker), Gainsbourg challenged audiences with his renegade behavior, risqué lyrics, and genre surfing—1979's reggae version of "La Marseillaise" was a succès de scandale.
Gainsbourg "created his own musical form out of his lack of a singing voice and his personal obsessions, a kind of ongoing autobiographical erotic novella," according to an obit included in A Fistful of Gitanes. In his Nabokovian masterpiece, Histoire de Melody Nelson (1971), a Rolls-Royce driver runs into a red-haired 15-year-old English girl, deemed the "Spirit of Ecstasy"; the "déliceuse enfant" dies in a plane crash soon after her sexual initiation. And in the darker L'Homme à Tête de Chou ("The Man With the Cabbage Head," 1976), a journalist brutally murders his unfaithful girlfriend and serenades her corpse. Simmons lets Serge explain these preoccupations: "Love is dirty; the dirtier love is, the more beautiful it is."

The provocateur described by lover Birkin as pudique—reserved, shy, discreet, chaste—developed his dissipated alter ego, Gainsbarre, after she left him, ushering in his heartbreaking decline, marked by alcoholism and a debilitating cigarette addiction. (Right before he died, doctors were threatening to amputate his artereosclerotic legs.) Reminiscent of de Sade, he described his career as "a search for the truth via an injection of perversity"; upon his death at age 62 in 1991, President Mitterand dubbed him "our Baudelaire." Simmons delineates the wide reach of Gainsbourgisme, from Air to Pulp to Beck, but fails to mention Japanese chanteuse Kahimi Karie, whose 1994 Girly EP is an homage to Melody Nelson. While his music has enjoyed a revival, he remains identified with his self-cultivated lecherous persona; this biography, though breezy, offers a welcome corrective, showing the artist's lesser-known facets. Most necessary now in the field of Serge studies is a complete English-language translation of his lyrics, a definitive guide to such playful profundities as "L'amour physique est sans issue." 

[Jason]

Excellent article, Ian. Have you read this book?

I always thought the Gainsbarre thing was so cool, man. It was like a complete reinvention. Not many artists do that. Serge, once again, ahead of the pack.

[I. Spaceman]

Yes indeed. It's great. Sylvie Simmons has been my favorite music writer for a while now.

[Jason]

Is the book out of print?

[I. Spaceman]

Nope.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0306811839/102-7220832-7995366?v=glance&n=283155

[Jason]

Man, wouldn't you have loved to have seen Serge write an autobiography? The mind boggles at what could've been covered there.

[I. Spaceman]

True. If his lyrics could be translated and published in book form, that would serve well though.

[Jason]

Ehhhh, I would feel two ways about translated lyrics. There's always something lost in the translation. I translated Je T'Aime Moi Non Plus and the lyrics weren't as shocking as they were "weird". The original language always has the most meaning behind it.

Os Mutantes hurt their reputation, in my opinion, by recording an English-language album of some of their classics. The lyrics just sounded dumb.

[I. Spaceman]

It's important that a translator has a deep knowledge of the text they are working with, as a literal translation of words is a bigg difference from translation of meaning.
Perhaps the greatest example of that is the difference between the 50's and 90's translations of Kurt Weill's work.

[Jason]

Exactly. I'm sure a workable job could be done with Serge's lyrics.....but I don't want to imagine the furor it would lead to in France, to have Serge's poetry translated.

[I. Spaceman]

Haha, I think it would cause a greater furor here, if pseudo-hipsters could understand what the "cute little ugly French dude" was really singing about.

[Jason]

Yeah, I wouldn't want to be the guy who reads the lyrics to Vu de L'Exterieur after having played it on a romantic night with his girlfriend.

[Jason]

Ian, I'm going through my Serge stuff....I have a track called "Fugue", off of one of the jazz compilations. Do you have this track?

[jazzfascist]

Yeah, I wouldn't want to be the guy who reads the lyrics to Vu de L'Exterieur after having played it on a romantic night with his girlfriend.

Well as Gainsbourg apparently said: "Love is dirty; the dirtier love is, the more beautiful it is." So maybe that would be a relaxing thought.
But anyway contrary what it says in the Jacobi article he did have a singing voice and sang pretty straightforwardly, albeit kind of dramatic on his first records, but then he started to talk over the tracks instead, also his duet partners like Bardot, Birkin and his daughter didn't display big voices as well. So sometimes on his records it's like the music takes the backseat and is more background music for some spoken passion play. He also arrranges the voices a little like it's done on Leonard Cohen records, where there is often angelic female background voices and then a dark male voice in the front, maybe a little like the beauty and beast setting he sometimes was photographed in. So in some ways he may be a little of a french dirtier, campier version of Leonard Cohen and  maybe also a little like Lou Reed around the "Transformer/ Berlin" period.

Søren

[Jason]

Wbut then he started to talk over the tracks instead

I think that was due to the fact that his voice was starting to go by age 40 thanks to his years of tobacco abuse. On You're Under Arrest, the man can barely let out a rasp. Kind of like Dennis Wilson near the end. Eventually, all Serge could do was whisper or speak in a rasp. Mostly, he whispered.