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Serge Gainsbourg
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Some songs can cure you of waking to a clock radio. Some strike you as worse than any buzzer. Some songs make the most jarring buzzer brim by contrast with richly expressive, human content. I kicked the clock radio habit one morning upon hearing a cover of Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot's "Bonnie and Clyde."
I was confused. Like other artists for whom English is not their first language, Gainsbourg has recorded multilingual versions of a song -- he did so with "Bonnie and Clyde" in 1968. There are also two different studio recordings from the late '60s of his most famous song, "Je t'aime...Moi non plus." The 1969 duet version with his wife Jane Birkin (who had formerly been married to James Bond soundtrack composer John Barry) sold five million copies worldwide, and can easily be distinguished from the version with Brigitte Bardot, which was recorded the year before but not released until almost twenty years later. I prefer the Bardot version for its elegiac vice-squad siren string accompaniment and, impossible as it seems, even more insistently breathy character. But there can be a disorienting effect, akin to that felt by Name That Tune contestants, on hearing the opening chords of "Je t'aime": which version is this?
Such was the case on waking to this version of "Bonnie and Clyde." Serge's shaky English is one thing, but where's the need for this cover version with its shaky French? And a nondescript, alright, a crummy arrangement? Were they banking on the fact that no one in radio land had heard the original? Gainsbourg and Bardot's version is a gorgeously thick sound, with no particular climax (as opposed to, say "Je t'aime," or the return of the simulated orgasm in the 1971 "En Melody"). It keeps a steady gallop. The song is an uninterrupted pulse, a four-chord vamp whose cycle begins and ends each time with a ghostly whoop or shivering hiccup -- it's not an easy sound to describe. The fact that the whoop-sound acts like a sample was not lost on French rapper M.C. Solar, who put it to similar use. The trade-off between male and female voices happens mid-line, making the song always ever more about balance and momentum. When the song ends, I prefer to start it over at the beginning. That's just how I usually listen to it. When I say that the trade-off between voices makes this song "about" something, this speaks equally to my involvement with the song and my grasp of French -- which are, alas, anything but equal.
So, not listening with a French dictionary in hand, what do I know about Gainsbourg's songs? I know that he's my favorite French singer, that I get hooked on half-understood turns of phrase (you can hear him bending meanings right and left, I'm certain), that he's utterly cruel. Not "me too" but "Moi non plus" -- "me neither." But also it never occurs to me to listen with a dictionary in hand, nor to consult one afterwards. I know that he was born Lucien Ginsburg. He's the man who shocked Whitney Houston by propositioning her on a French talk show ("I want to fuck you"; also memorably reminding her that they were not Reagan and Gorbachev), who recorded "Rock Around the Bunker," who dueted with his fourteen year-old daughter on "Lemon Incest," and who bought the original manuscript of the "Marseillaise" so as to have the rights to record it with Sly and Robbie (another number-one hit). I'd sure love to see the TV special with Brigitte Bardot -- his '68 comeback.
Good luck searching for the records. Of the eternally pornographic late '60s / early '70s material, you're most likely to be blessed in finding "Je t'aime...Moi non plus" and "Histoire de Melody Nelson." Currently in print on CD is a nine-volume (also sold individually) collection, of which I strongly recommend volumes 2-5 (1961-1971) and, to a lesser extent, volume nine.
There were no shivering hiccups on the morning in question.
(Thanks to Rick Wojcik for supplying me with Momus' article, "Marquis de Sadness," which appeared in the July 15, 1989 NME, celebrating the French Bicentennial.)