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their love to a red rose, Gainsbourg only half-mockingly
compares his to seaweed ( Les goémons ). He subverts
the traditional conventions of the love song by inserting
previously alien or forbidden features; wilful inarticulacy
in Machins choses (an untranslatable word along the
lines of Thingamabob ), scenes of cuckolding in La
femme des uns sous l corps des autres ( The Wife
of One Under the Bodies of Others ), brute jealousy
in the bebop Le claqueur des doigts ( The Finger
Snapper ) and sadism in Hold-up . Gainsbourg may
reveal glimpses of his own callous delight in pain and
devastation but he does open up the beautiful lie of
romance to reality. Was he really a pessimist or just
someone smart, mature and perceptive enough to see
the mechanics behind the spectacle of love? Beneath
the paving stones, the beach. Beneath the romance,
the horror. Our concept of romance in the West was a
medieval invention tied to chivalry and the feudal order of
knights, kings, land-barons and serfs, damsels in distress
and the crusades. Valentine s Day was a reinvention of a
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DA R R A N A NDE R S ON
Christian feast by an unholy trinity of Victorian confec-
tioners, stationers and ad-men. The diamond wedding
ring and the tradition of men proposing by surprise was
a creation by the mining company De Beers and the ad
agency N. W. Ayer & Son who found that women and
couples spend less on rings than men buying them on
their own. Temporary madness or fraud it may well be,
love nevertheless remained a theme to which Gainsbourg
would return again and again, not least in Melody Nelson,
but it is a complicated, multifaceted love. It contains
within it questions of submission and dominance, desire
and distress and the causes of its own demise. In his
exquisite waltz La Javanaise , there is a doubt but also
a heart-rending pensive realism towards the fleeting
impermanence of perfection. The couple are together
only for as long as the song and dance last.
It was perhaps inevitable than such a view of human
relations would take Gainsbourg into the territory
of sex. It also placed him as an unlikely heir to
literary modernism. When Joyce, Miller, Lawrence,
Nin, Ginsberg and co. wrote about what we actually
think and what we actually do sexually as opposed to
the prescribed roles of what we ought to think and do,
their books were banned by the state and condemned
by the Church. Battles were fought not just for free-
thought but our innate right to be who we really
are. It was not just a question of censorship, it was a
question of life-negation and honesty. If Ulysses isn t
worth reading , Joyce once said, then life isn t worth
living. Although the battle had been won in literature,
temporarily at least, it had not even been attempted
in modern popular music. Gainsbourg had played in
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Milord l Arsouille, which had once employed blind
musicians due to the illicit activities of the audience.
See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. He had provided
the music for the licentious transvestite cabaret at
Madame Arthur s, where taboos were challenged with
good humour, artistic panache and an invigorating lack
of judgement. He had decided as Toulouse Lautrec had,
immersed in the Moulin Rouge performances and the
intrigues backstage, to try to do what is true and not
ideal . In the underground, the truth was revealed, as
in all art, through the telling of lies. By stark contrast,
the mainstream charts were still filled with preening
paramours and disingenuous coquettes, all singing
infantile versions of the same romantic lie for the
purpose of concealing the truth. The drag queens were
more honest than the role models. Whoever first broke
this spell and sang what people were really thinking
would bring religious and political disapproval down on
their heads. Yet there was also the possibility that people
were tired of maintaining the lie. Amazingly, no-one
had already tried it in France. Like any good immoralist,
Serge could not resist.
There had been erotic songs since the beginning of
recorded music with early blues and jazz being particu-
larly prolific and explicit sources. Artists such as Jelly
Roll Morton, even rock n roll itself, were named after
sexual analogies. By the tiresomely wholesome 1950s,
these rich strains of music had been censored and
airbrushed from history. Records like Shave em Dry by
Lucille Bogan and Press My Button (Ring My Bell) by
Lil Johnson would be more controversial 30 years after
recording than when conceived, demonstrating how far
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backwards sexual permissiveness, particularly women s,
had been forced. Gainsbourg returned to the source. Yet
none of his predecessors were quite as explicit as this.
Before, there were songs about sex. This was sex.
The idea came from Dali, Picasso is a painter, so am
I; Picasso is Spanish, so am I; Picasso is a communist,
neither am I. Je t aime & moi non-plus was ostensibly
an intensely erotic love song, albeit one with Gainsbourg s
trademark rakish scepticism. I love you begins the title,
Me neither comes the reply. The fact that neither party
care of the genuineness of their union, where it is leading
and the spell of abject abandon still continues only adds
to the wonderfully sordid nature of it. Again, accusations
of cynicism were levelled against the male narrator who
is simply an absolutist for the truth like Meursault in
Camus L Étranger (The Stranger). It is the world that
insists on lying. He knows that his partner, in the throes
of passion, will say anything. To paraphrase the Marquis
de Sade, who Gainsbourg would read and even play in a
television show, Every man at the point of orgasm is a
tyrant. Gainsbourg would imply the dubious backhanded
compliment that at the same point, every woman was a
liar. These are the casual deceptions we engage in; the
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