Bad new

s, America: Despite the best efforts of Prince, Kid Rock, Lil’ Kim and countless other homegrown horn-dogs, the world record for filthy brilliance still belongs to Serge Gainsbourg. France’s greatest pop star, who died in 1991 at a still-licentious 62, was the king of exquisite sleaze—and this recently exhumed Nabokovian pop-opera about the doomed love between a dirty old man and a smokin’-hot nymphet is exhibit X. Four decades later, it still has the power to make jaws and panties drop.
Gainsbourg shouldn’t have been the greatest anything of anywhere. He looked like what might result if a wolverine fucked a frog, and his droll, drowsy leer-sneer of a voice suggested he subsisted solely on Gitanes and Pernod. Yet his Gallic anti-charisma—perv and poet, sloshed rake and sallow bon vivant—infused everything he did, from smoky Paris-cafe balladry to kitschy, lounge-y miniskirt rock, with bizarre eros. Even if you don’t know French and miss his celebrated wordplay, it isn’t tough to discern his career’s main theme: outlaw love. His greatest hit, a 1968 duet with then-girlfriend Brigitte Bardot, “Bonnie and Clyde,” celebrates Hollywood’s coolest rebel romance. His second-greatest hit, 1969’s “Je T’aime, Moi Non Plus” (“I love you, me neither”), climaxes in a faked orgasm by the girl he got with after Bardot, 22-year-old British mega-babe Jane Birkin. (Gainsbourg was 41.) It inspired both condemnation from the Vatican and, a decade later, Donna Summer’s disco O-fest “Love to Love You Baby.”
Despite being only 28 minutes long, Histoire De Melody Nelson is where Gainsbourg’s provocateur streak takes on something resembling grand scope. Lush and languorous, velvet-robe decadent and soft-focus steamy, Histoire is a make-out record and a gross-out record—To Catch a Predator reimagined by a Eurotrash Barry White. It’s a classic love story: Lonely middle-aged pop star’s Rolls-Royce rams into the bike of a 15-year-old “délicieuse enfant” (the titular Melody, played by Birkin). Pop star seduces enfant in his private manse; pop star is way less lonely. Until (spoiler alert!) enfant breaks pop star’s heart by dying in a plane crash inexplicably caused by a tribe of jet-worshipping New Guinea sorcerer savages. Throughout, Serge’s groping monotone and Melody’s breathy giggles canoodle in libertine bliss atop lecherous funk bass and pillow-talk strings. Hippie guitar blasts add a fig leaf of sexual-revolution legitimacy, but there’s no rationalizing kicks this creepy.

“For me, provocation is like oxygen,” Gainsbourg once said. He walked a fine line between subversive and silly, influencing cheeky-monkey hipsters like Beck and Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker, who deploy decadence to tweak society’s standards. It’s anyone’s guess just how seriously he took himself, or if he was sane at all. (The video for 1984’s “Lemon Incest,” in which he sits shirtless on a bed singing to his pants-less 13-year-old daughter Charlotte, turns irony into a form of child abuse.) On Histoire, is he just pushing buttons when he describes “negroes carrying torches” carved into the mantle of their conjugal bed, or is this son of Russian immigrants commenting on France’s still-fresh colonial past?

He sure sounds serious. Where his early work had a buoyant kinkiness, Histoire is subtle and soft. The same slow, magic-fingers bass figure opens and closes the record, on the same ominous note. On “Ah! Melody,” Serge thrills to the spoils of conquest as an orchestra and fragile acoustic guitar coalesce for a soft-porn symphony; “En Melody,” the lithe, sweaty song during which Melody boards her fateful plane, turns a long-haired funk jam into something fevered and foreboding.

And throughout—whether in ecstasy, pain or mourning—Gainsbourg’s nicotine-stained voice barely rises above a suave grumble. Even on the sweeping seven-minute closer “Cargo Culte,” as an angel choir spirits away Melody’s corpse, leaving existentially strung-out Serge with no god to believe in and nothing to lose, he still sounds like all he needs to salve his angst is a bender and a week-long nap. C’est la vie. Anyway, they make new nymphets every day—fresh prey for this old bald eagle of dirty birds.

Download “La Ballade De Melody Nelson,” “En Melody,” “Cargo Culte”