[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
of his album Vu de l extérieur (Seen from the Exterior)
alongside snapshots of apes, he claimed it was a family
scrapbook. A Darwinian reminder that man is just the
most pompous of the primates. Give a monkey a brain
and he ll swear he s the centre of the universe , as the
Principia Discordia has it. There was nearly always a
tongue-in-cheek humour to Gainsbourg s slights. Take
the message on his second album N°2, explaining its
guns and roses cover, If they like my music, they get
the flowers. If not, the gunpowder. As Birkin, Bardot
and Deneuve would later attest, Gainsbourg s sardonic
bravado was a front for vulnerability. I m not a cynic
as others maintain , he revealed to the acutely cultured
and articulate television presenter Denise Glaser in
May 1971, I m a romantic. I always have been. As a
boy I was shy and romantic. I became cynical through
contact with others, who attacked me for my ugliness
and my candour. They confused candour with cynicism.
It was also a reason he drank increasingly towards self-
destruction. Of course, one can have the narcissism of
" 50 "
DA R R A N A NDE R S ON
entitlement and sensitivity, and not extend it to others.
Yet it doesn t quite fit.
Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life,
and a secret life , according to Gabriel García Márquez.
That is the real moral test; what we will do when we are
unseen. Behind closed doors, Gainsbourg was reputedly a
loving if troubled family man, dedicated to his daughters.
Within his skull, we can only hypothesize. He delib-
erately exaggerated the age difference between he and
Birkin to the point it would arouse emotions. Having
been shown old Super 8 footage of Jane as a child by her
brother Andrew, he exaggerated the menacing roleplay
further. He did, however, genuinely empathize with the
Melody Nelson narrator s feeling of growing old, He is on
the decline. He s desperate, he s a mess, he s worn out.
I m worn out as well, he laughed in footage from the
time replayed in Merlet s documentary (the same name
as the album), but I m still in use. Can a man who wrote
Je t aime and Bonnie and Clyde for Bardot as a gesture
for forgiveness and to consecrate their love be a cynic?
Or can one who wrote La Javanaise for Juliette Gréco
to mark a night they spent drinking and dancing together
be a misogynist? Who framed portraits of all the women
he had written songs for on his wall? Gainsbourg wrote
almost exclusively for and about women. Has there ever
been a songwriter more obsessed with every aspect of
the other sex? Perhaps he was a misogynist in the sense
he hated how much he was infatuated with women, the
power they wielded over him, in which case his songs are
really all about him, his frustrations, desires, his hatreds,
fetishes, all the weaknesses that better men and women
would never dare publicly admit. We can judge him if we
" 51 "
HI S TOI RE DE MELODY NELS ON
see fit but we will never know for sure; that would require
finding the key to Bluebeard s chamber as the myth goes,
whilst simultaneously hiding the key to our own.
Gainsbourg s obsession with the image of the Lolita
stretched back through his songs long before Histoire
de Melody Nelson. In his duet with Gillian Hills, Une
petit tasse d anxiété ( A Little Cup of Anxiety ), he
played a lecherous opportunist, picking up a girl who s
late for school. L Eau à la bouche ( Water by Mouth )
presented a deceptively reassuring predator while in
Cha cha cha du loup the mask slipped and, in a nod
to Little Red Riding Hood, the wolf underneath was
exposed. Often it was interchangeable with another
problematic, indeed offensive, image of the female as a
painted doll or puppet. It s a recurring trope mentioned
in songs like La plus belle femme ( The Most Beautiful
Woman ) and Negative Blues . The person most
associated with this contrived image was France Gall,
the youngest of his interpreters (until Vanessa Paradis),
and one frequently cited as evidence of Gainsbourg s
heartlessness. Embittered that the record-buying public
had neglected him and that Édith Piaf had the incon-
sideracy to die before recording his songs, Gainsbourg
was bemused to find he had hit the big time writing
disposable gibberish for teenyboppers. After a series of
hits with Gall, his irritation began to show. In the video
for Pauvre Lola ( Poor Lola ), he leers over the giggling
naïve Gall, except he isn t so much leering as watching
her with faintly amused contempt. Intentionally or not,
Gainsbourg sabotaged their collaborative partnership
by giving her Les sucettes , a seemingly innocent song
about a girl s love of sucking lollipops. Even the giant
" 52 "
DA R R A N A NDE R S ON
dancing phalluses in the video were not enough to alert
Gall or any of her entourage to the Freudian analogy
therein. When she found out what she d been singing
about, Gall was mortified, locked herself away from
the public for a month and vowed never to speak to
Gainsbourg again.
While there s no doubting Serge s impertinence, the
betrayal of trust and the horrendous embarrassment it
caused, the Gainsbourg Gall partnership was not quite
as exploitative as might seem. He did, in fact, continue
to write for her, working with Vannier on the seasick
bubblegum pop of Les petits balloons , for example.
Beyond a surface reading, the songs he wrote for her
are not the puppet on a string (it s intriguing to note
that Gainsbourg came to collect puppets of himself in
later life) or mindless Lolita indictments or inducements
they appear. Attends ou va-t en ( Wait or Go Away )
and Laisse tomber les filles ( Leave the Girls Alone )
are feisty assertive songs from a female perspective to
the extent of being threatening. In Dents de lait, Dents
de loup ( Baby Teeth, Wolf Teeth ) she admits to being
a wolf cub but she still can bite. Even Poupée de cire,
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]