Relax Baby Be Cool

Jeremy Allen

Description

"Relax Baby Be Cool is a trip into unraveling the mind and genius of one of the greatest artists of all time. Although Gainsbourg’s music has been discovered by new generations, his life has rarely been illuminated and contextualized with such style and insight." BECK

Why has Serge Gainsbourg crossed over to the English-speaking world when so many of his contemporaries have remained largely confined to the Francosphere? What is it about this unshaven provocateur that so appeals to us? And who was the real Serge Gainsbourg anyway? Was he the sensitive seducer and songwriting colossus of the 60s and 70s? Was he Lucien Ginsburg, the son of Russian Jewish refugees who had to wear a yellow star during the Nazi Occupation of Paris? Or was he Gainsbarre, the deplorable, attention-seeking drunk who shamelessly propositioned Whitney Houston on live TV?

Gainsbourg’s cult has only grown since his death in 1991, and Histoire de Melody Nelson is now regarded as a classic in France and internationally. The 1971 album had only sold eighty thousand copies by 1986, when it finally went gold fifteen years after its release; its canonical elevation is a remarkable story, and there are many more remarkable stories attached to all of Gainsbourg’s genre-defying, transgressive long-players. In Relax Baby Be Cool, writer Jeremy Allen takes each studio album in turn while exploring themes pertinent to Gainsbourg’s life and music: performance, provocation, theft, dandyism, avantgardism, muses, Nazis, film and TV, Surrealism, vice, posterity, and fame. 

French pop music is more popular than it’s been since the mid-90s, when the French touch was breaking. Gainsbourg’s influence has also been huge on alternative music: from Pulp to Massive Attack, De La Soul to Danger Mouse, Black Grape to Kylie, David Guetta to Die Antwoord, Air to Iggy Pop. This book is full of new interviews from people who knew him, but also younger artists who discovered him after his death. Contributors include Jane Birkin, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Jacqueline Ginsburg (Gainsbourg’s sister), Anna Karina, Mike Patton, Etienne Daho, Sly Dunbar, Alan Hawkshaw, JeanClaude Vannier, Tony Frank, Mick Harvey, Bertrand Burgalat, Acid Arab, Jehnny Beth, Alan Chamfort, Metronomy, David Holmes, Blonde Redhead, Nicolas Godin of Air, Russell Mael of Sparks, Will Oldham, and many more.

Sujets

• Musique
• Histoire de la musique
• Music
• Musician
• Individual Composer

Informations

• Publié par: Jawbone Press
• Date de parution: 14 février 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781911036661
• Langue: English

Extrait

RELAX
BABY
BE COOL
THE ARTISTRY AND AUDACITY OF SERGE GAINSBOURG
JEREMY ALLEN

A JAWBONE BOOK
Published in the UK and the USA
by Jawbone Press
Office G1
141–157 Acre Lane
London SW2 5UA
England
www.jawbonepress.com

Volume copyright © 2021 Outline Press Ltd. Text copyright © Jeremy Allen. All rights reserved. No part of this book covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or copied in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles or reviews where the source should be made clear. For more information contact the publishers.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

1 JAZZ BEGINNINGS
2 PERFORMANCE
3 APPROPRIATION
4 SCREEN
5 AESTHETICS
6 MUSES
7 POSTMODERNISM
8 ROCK BOTTOM
9 NAZI ROCK
10 METAMORPHOSIS
11 FAME
12 PROVOCATION
13 DECLINE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION
THE CULT OF SERGE

March 1991. Things were changing in significant, imperceptible ways as the analogue world began to fall away. Tim Berners-Lee had recently trialled a browser for the World Wide Web at CERN for the first time; the first Gulf War had just come to a ceasefire; the jury of the Hillsborough disaster inquiry was about to return an accidental death verdict for ninety-six Liverpool fans crushed to death during an FA Cup game with Nottingham Forest; ‘Do The Bartman’ by The Simpsons was Britain’s fictitious no.1, having knocked off ‘3am Eternal’ by merry art-pranksters The KLF; Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho was about to be published, on the way to causing shockwaves of controversy; and the biggest film in the UK, Green Card , was an incontestably non-controversial movie about an immigrant, played by the French actor Gérard Depardieu, attempting to outstay his welcome in the United States.
There was little room in the news in the English-speaking world for the death of a French singer. Serge Gainsbourg passed away at his home on the Left Bank in Paris after suffering a heart attack. At the time, he was perhaps regarded by the UK press as a musical footnote, having provided some erotic novelty value toward the end of the 1960s as the author of the UK’s first ever foreign-language no.1, and the perpetrator of an international scandal twenty-two years earlier with his then partner, Jane Birkin. Across the channel, the news of Gainsbourg’s death, aged sixty-two, was more akin to a national tragedy, with the whole country going into mourning. ‘People remember where they were when they heard that Gainsbourg was dead,’ says Birkin, sitting across from me in her bijou, boho, black-clad apartment in the sixth arrondissement of Paris. ‘It’s the thing that shocked people the most, like John F. Kennedy. Everything stopped. It was incredible.’
‘I just happened to arrive in Paris early the day that he died,’ says veteran music journalist John Robb. ‘It was eerily quiet, and in those pre-internet days you could feel something had happened. The city felt spooked. Later on, I found out a national icon had died.’
While the streets were quiet, kids congregated outside the singer’s apartment on Rue de Verneuil—a gathering not unlike the ones at the Dakota Building and Central Park, Manhattan, after the assassination of John Lennon. Candlelit vigils continued as the sun went down.
Jane Birkin and Serge’s manager, Philippe Lerichomme, found it difficult to reach Gainsbourg’s daughters, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Kate Berry (the daughter of John Barry, who Serge brought up as his own), inside the apartment. ‘By the time I arrived at Rue de Verneuil with Philippe, a crowd was in the street, singing “La Javanaise”. They’d blocked the whole street. The candles were out. It was quite extraordinary to try to get to the front door to find Kate and Charlotte and Bambou, who were closeted on the inside.’ Caroline von Paulus, aka Bambou, was Serge’s final partner.
The words ‘he was our Baudelaire, our Apollinaire’, from President François Mitterand, are oft quoted, given the elevation afforded the singer by France’s longest-serving president. Though politicians are adept at wringing the auspices out of a good tragedy to help boost their own popularity, the high praise for Gainsbourg was seemingly genuine enough. ‘He elevated the chanson to the level of art …’ These words would have particularly pleased Serge, were he still alive; he considered pop music a ‘minor art’—or at least that’s what he always maintained—and he regarded the vernacular tradition of the chanson variété francaise with only slightly less disdain. As a failed painter who’d been steeped in the music of classical composers like Chopin and avant-garde geniuses like Stravinsky and Debussy by a pushy, tyrannical father, Gainsbourg was disparaging about popular song to an extent that implied embarrassment. ‘I practise a minor art that’s supposed to be for young people,’ he once said, sniffily. 1
‘He was taken to the Mont Valerien just outside Paris, where they put heroes,’ says Birkin, ‘so people could walk past his coffin. I remember asking a man there whether he’d stay with him overnight to keep an eye on him, and he said it would be a privilege to. People were so kind and so terribly moved. The taxis came with flowers because he used to tip them five hundred francs at the end of each journey. The whole of France seemed to be in that cemetery. Catherine Deneuve read ‘Fuir le bonheur de peur qu’il ne se sauve’. The words to ‘Fuir le bonheur ...’, recorded by Birkin on her 1983 Baby Alone in Babylone album, are as elegant and celestial—not to mention, respectable—as Gainsbourg ever got. ‘There was no ceremony because Serge’s sister Jacqueline didn’t want him to be taken by any religion. And that day I’ve never seen anything like it, and I haven’t since, apart from when Johnny Hallyday died.’
For a whole generation who embraced him when his own generation and the generation that came after had held him at arm’s length, it wasn’t Gainsbourg in that casket—it was Gainsbarre . Lucien ‘Lulu’ Ginsburg was born in 1928, an early entry into a demographic labelled the ‘silent generation’, and already an elder statesman of song by the time he was writing hits for yé-yé baby boomers while his own career was pushed to the peripheries. We can regard ‘Je t’aime … moi non plus’ as an anomaly, a perfect storm of controversy that precipitated a massive international hit, even in places that at the time wouldn’t normally recognise a song written in French (step forward the UK). Serge’s musical career partially slipped back into the shadows following what was a commercial aberration, though he maintained a presence on French TV during the 1970s, begrudgingly tossing off witty songs for sundry light entertainers and chanteuses on Saturday-night telly.
It was reggae that saved Gainsbourg in the late 70s, just as Eurovision Song Contest winner France Gall had saved him in the mid-60s. Then, when he and Jane Birkin broke up, he invented Gainsbarre, a drunken doppelgänger he could brazenly parade around and blame all of his bad behaviour on. It was a Faustian pact that would have consequences. This alter ego, enshrined within another alter ego, would grow like a pernicious weed as he went in pursuit of ratings. But for more than a decade from his 1979 album Aux armes et cætera , which caused huge controversy by marrying the French national anthem to a reggae track, Serge enjoyed the adulation of Generation Xers who hung on his every transgressive word. He became a late-night TV fixture, bibulous and bellicose, spouting the supposedly unsayable in public with relish, and offending everyone’s parents in the process. Burning a five hundred franc banknote on TV, humiliating Guy Béart on the arts talk show Apostrophes , calling Les Rita Mitsouko’s Catherine Ringer a ‘pute’, telling Champs-Élysées chat show host Michel Drucker ‘I want to fuck’ Whitney Houston …
These were stunts designed to shock. To shatter the illusion of cosiness. To get people talking and seize the front page. Musician and pop impresario Bertrand Burgalat tells me about some of the differing generational perceptions from a French perspective: ‘My father was born in 1919 and my mother in 1922, and for these people he really was a dirty man.’ And Gainsbarre was impelled to up the ante wherever there was a spotlight. Jacques Wolfsohn, the mastermind behind Disques Vogue and one of Gainsbourg’s best friends, told the writer Marie-Dominique Lelièvre, for her 1994 biography Gainsbourg sans filtre , ‘Until “La Marseillaise” he was normal. A fairly standard carouser. After “La Marseillaise” he believed his own hype. He created this image and suddenly tried to become him.’ 2
This addiction to attention, even from behind the dark glasses of Gainsbarre, comes as little surprise to us today, in a celebrity-saturated twenty-first century where every two-bit pop star has assumed a persona. Perhaps more surprising is the fact the albums he is rightly exalted for now— Histoire de Melody Nelson , L’homme à tête de chou , Initials B.B. , and so on—were hidden from view for a lot of fans until after his death.
‘When he died, only a few aesthetes remembered the earlier stuff,’ says Burgalat. ‘He became a huge and popular figure in France with albums that were very different to those records. His early repertoire wasn’t available on vinyl, and you had to find earlier songs on compilations.’ Burgalat likens Gainsbourg’s 80s popularity to another chansonnier , Claude Nougaro, who he says ‘made some beautiful albums but then ended up broke. He went to New York with some stupid French jazz-rock musician, Philippe Saisse, to do an album called Nougayork . It’s the worst kind of bad 80s funk done with a Yamaha DK7 … a huge success! Sometimes people in France become successful with their worst records.’
*
Long before Christan Marclay was proverbially dragging in people who don’t normally go to art galleries to see his conceptual masterwork, The Clock , he was creating mus