Histoire de Melody Nelson

Serge Gainsbourg had no great attachment to genre. By the time he came to rock music, in his early 40s, the French star had traced his oblique, provocative course through chanson (French vocal music), jazz, and light pop. He'd made percussive café jams about suic ide and given Eurovision popstrels France Gall and Françoise Hardy songs full of blowjob puns. Later on he'd make a rock'n'roll album about the Nazis and a reggae take on the French national anthem. A pattern emerges: Gainsbourg hops from style to style, but with a terrific instinct for finding the most startling content for any given form.

Serge Gainsbourg was already the creator of one of the most lascivious pop singles of all time, the infamous “Je T’Aime... Moi Non Plus,” when he released Histoire de Melody Nelson — a short, psychedelic, operatic concept album about a brusque affair between a mid dle-aged lecher and an underage nymphet with “naturally red hair” (played by Gainsbourg’s then-wife, muse, and collaborator Jane Birkin). Although widely accepted as a classic album, it also has a stigma attached to it: no matter what musical barriers Gainsbourg surpassed, he always seemed, first and foremost, a dirty old man bent on shocking more than creating art. Certainly, Gainsbourg lived every minute of his life by his own envelope-pushing mantra (“For me, provocation is oxygen”), but he was also a romantic of the highest order, compared to Rimbaud while living, to Baudelaire in death.