Serge Gainsbourg, influential and uncomfortable 30 years after dying

Serge Gainsbourg liked to play with the image of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and their legacy, three decades after their death, is interpreted under this ambivalent sign, both luminous and uncomfortable.

Gainsbourg was one of the last total artists that France has had, a musician, composer, performer and poet whose influence inside and outside the country has not stopped growing since he died on March 2, 1991, at the age of 62.

He was also a man who on television could disrespect a singer like Whitney Houston by telling her, in offensive words, that he wanted to sleep with her, or that he sang of love for his teenage daughter Charlotte in terms that might seem ambiguous.

• Charlotte Gainsbourg: "I do not have the talent of my father or the beauty of my mother"

• Serge Gainsbourg and women: a story too complicated to summarize in a 'tweet'

"I think now my father would be condemned for every move he made,"

singer and actress Charlotte Gainsbourg, who is now 49 years old

, told the British newspaper

The Guardian

in 2019

.

“Everything is so politically correct, so boring, so predictable.

And everyone is scared by what will happen if it goes too far. "

The episode with Whitney Houston, in 1986, is one of these videos that periodically resurfaces on social networks.

Gainsbourg says in English, alluding to the American singer, sitting next to him:

I want to fuck her

.

The American singer responds surprised: "My God."

The audience laughs.

Those were his last years, those of his true popular success, in which he had assumed the public mask of the character he baptized as Gainsbarre, a

drunken

alter ego

subscribed to scandal.

In 1984 he burned a 500 franc bill during a television interview to denounce what the treasury was taking from his income.

Many of the comments about how “troublesome”, as

Les Inrockuptibles

magazine puts it

, that Gainsbourg could turn out in 2021 revolve around a song that Serge and Charlotte recorded for the

1984

album

Love On The Beat

. titled

Lemon Incest

, a pun on "

zeste de citron"

, lemon peel.

In French it sounds the same as lemon incest.

Incest is the key word in the current French debate on sexual abuse.

The immediate motive is the book

The Big Family

, in which the author, Camille Kouchner, reveals the incestuous abuse of her stepfather, the well-known political scientist Olivier Duhamel, to her brother when he was a teenager.

The book has unleashed a wave of complaints for similar cases.

A careful reading of

Lemon Incest's

lyrics

brings some light.

This is what Chloé Thibaud, who was born the year Gainsbourg died, recommends doing and has just published

En relisant Gainsbourg

(Rereading Gainsbourg), an essay that shows that he was a poet with a precise knowledge of tradition and versification.

Thibaud regrets that

Lemon Incest

is criticized

without looking at the central verses, which say: "The love we will never make together / It is the rarest, the most disturbing / The purest, the most exciting."

"Letting

love

say

that we will never make together

is very important and people do not pay enough attention," defends Thibaud, who in the book emphasizes that Gainsbourg "never committed pedophile or incestuous acts."

"Fortunately, today issues such as incest are addressed and reported," he says.

"Unfortunately, a song like this could not exist, because today there is immense censorship, the time is more radical."

Thibaud adds: “

Lemon Incest

is a song, like

Lolita

is a novel.

It is important that in art limits can be crossed, tackled taboo subjects, provoke ”.

Charlotte Gainsbourg, in an interview in

Télérama

magazine

, states: “Would an album like this make more noise today?

Surely.

Would it be possible to record it?

He would.

And I also.

Lemon Incest

is a declaration of pure and innocent love from a father to his daughter.

Without a doubt, he plays with words and what is forbidden, but wasn't his strength there?

"You can't take someone from fifty years ago and put him today saying: 'What he was doing was a shame, it was a scandal.'

It was another time, ”says Constance Meyer, author of

La jeune fille et Gainsbourg

(The young woman and Gainsbourg), a book in which she recounts her relationship with the artist in the last five years of her life.

When they met, she was 16 and he was 57.

“You have to say things clearly: the sexual majority in France is 15 years old.

I was 16. I was the one who approached Serge.

There was never any ambiguity, nor a displaced gesture.

There is no topic, ”Meyer responds.

“I fell in love with an older man, but it was legal.

He didn't have any ascendants on me.

There is no problem ”.

Meyer passes almost every day on his way to work in front of the Montparnasse cemetery, where Gainsbourg is buried, and talks to him.

The tomb is covered by flower pots.

The other Gainsbourguian sanctuary in Paris is the graffiti-covered house at 5 bis rue de Verneuil, which should soon open as a museum.

"I often thank him," Meyer explains.

“Sometimes I also ask him to help me.

I say, 'I have a little concern, give me your energy.'

And works.

I have the impression of being connected with him ”.

Between Dalí and Houellebecq

Serge Gainsbourg had something of Salvador Dalí, from whom he learned that the staging of a hooligan and provocative character is part of the work.

And today the writer Michel Houellebecq has something of Gainsbourg in his public attitude.

They share the washed-out image and admiration for the decadent dandyism of the 19th century.

Gainsbourg, the son of Russian Jews who had to wear the Star of David during the Nazi occupation, was always modern.

He went through all the genres of his time: French song, ye-yé, 'reggae', disco, 'rap'.

He left memorable compositions for France Gall, Françoise Hardy or Brigitte Bardot.

And especially for her great love, Jane Birkin, Charlotte's mother, with whom she performed classics such as 'Je t'aime moi non plus' or 'L'histoire de Melody Nelson'.

In the picture, Gainsbourg with the singer France Gall, with whom he had a relationship, at Orly airport, the day after she won Eurovision in 1965.