if the MPAA rated You and Me and Everyone We Know “R” for “disturbing sexual imagery involving children” i wonder what they would have done with Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson. most famous in this country for telling Whitney Houston that he wanted to fuck her on French TV, Serge Gainsbourg was a dirty old man French version of Burt Bacharach. but unlike Bacharach, who has paid the bills with his unoffensive bubblegum song arrangements, Gainsbourg was constantly manipulating his sound as he absorbed new styles and influences, and no topic was off limits.let’s face it, dirty old men falling in love (and doing other unsavory things) with “innocent” nubile girls is not a new concept in art. Nabokov’s Lolita scandalously covered the topic and was adapted into a movie by Stanley Kubrick. two recent films, Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers and the aforementioned You and Me and Everyone We Know address the taboo as part of the plot. but Gainsbourg is so overt about his theme that the listener is sure to be taken aback by its directness, even if they don’t speak French. you can hear Gainsbourg’s voice dripping with sleaze while Jane Birkin (playing the role of the nymph Melody Nelson) sweetly sings along. you almost get the feeling that he is about to pounce like a vampire our for blood, especially with the funk influenced music playing in the background, a prototypical version of today’s cliched notion of incidental music for pornographic movies to be sure. this is not to say that Histoire is not one of the great musical expressions set to tape. it is. it just takes a while to get over the subject matter.
my friend Ryan once told me that he was floored by the fact that Bach’s love of Christ could inspire him to compose the Mass in B Minor. (i feel the same way about Coltrane’s A Love Supreme.) Serge Gainsbourg is proof that the Devil was also a muse for artists, and for every Mona Lisa, there’s going to be a stack of French porn. Grade: A+
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