Posted By BillHeise on April 6, 2010

My feeling on Serge’s life is a little different than Joann Sfar’s on the life of Serge Gainsbourg. She seems to think that the scandals of his life will pass, but the legend remains.

I tend to think that things pass into legend because human memory is so fallible. This is why we constantly have to learn sometimes harsh lessons about things we thought we already knew and had gotten past.

The fact is that the scandals in Serge’s life had a wider impact than his own life. His actions affected younger singers like France Gall, who perhaps was young and naïve. Perhaps this had been acceptable in 1964, when young girls were embraced by the French public for their girlish innocence, but art was about to change. The sexual revolution would place a woman’s beauty, and not their innocence, at the forefront of the aesthetic experience. Later superstars like Jane Birkin and Madonna learned to take control of their bodies. They used them, rather than having them used by others, and by this declared their independence.

OK, I admit that France was young and naïve and Serge dragged her into adulthood in public before she was ready. Part of the joke, you know. And perhaps we cannot go back to the ye-ye girls without a certain amount of nostalgia.

But I tend to have a certain amount of sympathy for France Gall. Isn’t that sort of sympathy what Derrida is always talking about: holding up the things that have been forgotten or suppressed by those who hold temporarily the reins of social control? So, in the interest of fairness, I want to go back in history and re-express what the French are trying to suppress.

Before she had met Serge, young France was indeed singing songs with sexual themes, as here in her 1964 hit Ne Sois Pas Si Bête. (This song is only 2:20 long on my CD (pictured above), but in the early days of 1964, they edited it down to a reasonable 1:38).

He is very shy with his buddies
But with girls, he fears nothing.
Every time we dance, we just snob
And in his arms, so in his arms
He uses words like this:

Do not be so stupid, stupid, stupid
Hold me stronger, and harder still
Do not worry, do not worry me
Because you’re still a little girl for me

After her experience with Serge, she was a bit sick of France, and she went international, singing in German. She was so successful in this part of her career that she actually has a Best of France Gall in German Album:

Here she is at another European singing contest singing Computer Number 3, a song about computer dating. Look at her dance and you will be able to see why Madonna was so much more concerned with the movement of her body:

She even had the audacity to interrupt a Frenchman singing about France to perform L’Amerique, a song sung by a naïve young girl about what she thought America would be like (big buildings and big skies sung to the accompaniment of a banjo):

Ah, it’s tempting to visit
America
When you have dreamed for 17 years
About America

I will go to Texas
And Colorado
Not to mention Kansas
And San Francisco

She must have liked America. Is that a Cubs hat she’s wearing?

But progress is progress. The women of the 70’s and 80’s had learned from her mistakes. Nevertheless, she was a superstar in her day, and I still think her music stands on its own. We should not forget her contribution just because we like looking at Jane Birkin or Madonna’s freely-shown breasts. Breasts do not make the woman, but they sure can help you pave the road to fame and fortune.

Jane Birkin didn’t even have to sing well. Her sensational life and beauty were enough to keep her in the forefront of the French public eye. It was a bonus for the American public that Madonna sand good songs. But even Madonna, who has now had children, has gone Oprah and has transcended her former base sexuality and made herself into a pillar of New Age religiosity. It’s as if she had never whored herself out in the first place. And she is able to hire publicists and others who make sure she doesn’t have to face the harsh accusations, which she used to dismiss as the arguments of the little people who were nothing more than timid, closed-off creatures who wanted what only she had the power and audacity to go out and grab.

This idea seems to me to be about as undemocratic as Nina Hagen, who also found God at the end of her quest for individual self-expression.

I would be tempted to dismiss them both if I thought that shying away from sex was the answer to having too much sex in art. But I don’t think that. I think, however, that having a little balance in your coverage of yourself (Madonna) or of Serge Gainsbourg would not be such a back thing as opposed to the situation we are now in where people have to ignore those who object to what has always been considered suspect. Are we progressing? Or are we merely forgetting what our ancestors knew about traveling down the path of decadence?

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