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“Gainsbourg wasn't a saint? Big deal !"

2021-03-03T18:19:22.041Z


FIGAROVOX / HUMEUR - The singer who died thirty years ago combines all the vices chased by the current culture of banishment. For Benjamin Sire, art will be dead the day the world celebrates only “suitable” artists.


Benjamin Sire is a composer and journalist.

We had felt it coming for a while and we could imagine that this anniversary would not succeed in avoiding the caudine forks of the new "progressive" good-thinking which, every day, resembles more the old reactionary morality once embodied by the he former mayor of Tours, Jean Royer, nicknamed "pere-la-pudeur".

Gainsbourg died 30 years ago.

Thirty already, barely thirty years old ... and by way of sorrow emerges the one that terraces us to see modernity and youth having aged before being, to use Brel's expression, another giant.

Who knows moreover, he too will perhaps soon be in the sights of "cancel culture", this mixture of importation of American bullshit and Stalinist nostalgia which sees our youngsters of today transforming into severe vicars, when yesterday they would have considered themselves punks?

Read also: Serge Gainsbourg, still alive

Gainsbourg died 30 years ago and, at a time when the bars so dear to his heart are closed, Gainsbarre is undoubtedly fed up, to see the left afford modesty of rosebushes at the evocation of its excesses.

Because such is good, concerning the great Serge, like others before him, what we are witnessing on these (little) social networks which, believing themselves to be a real society, are adorned every day with the face of dry Victorian bitterness.

At the time of the illusory “start-up nation”, even the artist, this exception (cultural) logically rebellious to decorum, is summoned to present his certificate of moral and behavioral purity.

However, this virtuous ultimatum represents nothing other than the vertiginous fall of what humanity means, that is to say this crude mixture of vices and virtues, of itchy turpitudes and elevation.

The day (which is approaching) when the world will celebrate only “decent” artists, art will be dead.

And the day when art is dead, human beings will be too, giving way to the humanoid.

The day the world celebrates only "decent" artists, art will be dead.

Benjamin Sire

Art doesn't have to be decent.

It goes beyond, it illuminates, it strikes, it fascinates, it is beauty, it is roughness, it is question, it is doubt, it is adventure, it is introspection, it is affirmation, it is liberation.

It should never have the function of being suitable, although it can also be.

Yet it becomes so, swallowed up by the market and the moral order.

The artist is something else.

Let him languish in dark jails if he has, as sometimes happens, confused inspiration with impunity and stepped on the penal code.

But please, grace his flights, amnesties his shared emotion, close our eyes to the sacred notes, even those that denote in the face of this desire for purity that animates our time and, always, at all times, has seen its virtuous incantations transform. in mass graves.

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Gainsbourg was not a saint?

Big deal !

The scoop !

The singer was trashy, sometimes vulgar, often borderline, sometimes odious, always talented, already scratching the surface of a society whose canons he did not espouse, but who still knew how to judge a work without deeming it necessary to give to its author a moral discharge before broadcasting it.

Yet this abundant work, in which authentic strokes of genius meet, openness to all trends, adaptation of a masterpiece of the classic by way of bridges, just as much as the lazy languor of the taxpayer besieged by taxes, is a pan unbreakable heritage of French song.

Unbreakable yes, while statues are falling everywhere that will surely rise up when reason returns (because it always returns).

In the meantime, all the attempts to attack the legend Gainsbourg will come up against the sensitivity of those and those, innumerable, who saw their heart, if it was not their feet - as was the case of those of your servant - turn towards 5 bis rue de Verneuil, in the 7th arrondissement of Paris, on this fatal day in March 1991.

Gainsbourg was not a saint?

Big deal !

Benjamin Sire

Because here, we are talking about emotion, that which transcends words and notes to envision a soul that shakes ours.

And this emotion always refers, for better or for worse, to the artist whose name, if we do not have to espouse customs, we cannot erase the name.

Read also: The day ... Gainsbourg became Gainsbarre

Alas, if Gainsbourg has to be tried by the court for one day, whatever the prescription, judge it by the yardstick of your certainties at the time.

Burn it at the stake of your modesty.

But at the time of the accounts on an hourglass of several centuries, do not forget the precaution of Montaigne: "

The world is only a perennial shackle: all things are constantly moving there, the earth, the rocks of the Caucasus, the pyramids of Egypt, and the public movement, and theirs.

"

And in the end, the roly returns to its place of origin.

In the meantime, look at yourself, watch us die under our masks of circumstances, deprived of contact, deprived of live shows, deprived of joy, plunging us into a standardized world without protruding edges, where even the jester should be wise , where even the carnival should forget its transgressive essence, where even the artist should submit to the leagues of virtues before (no longer) undressing the muses.

Is this really what we want?

Live on decency to die of boredom?

And already, at the evocation of these lines, we can guess the prudish comments that will come to sully the meaning and see there the defense of who knows what debauchery, because in addition to the artistic license, it is also the nuance that we murder nowadays.

Is this really what we want?

Live on decency to die of boredom?

Benjamin Sire

Some time ago circulated on the web a montage comparing the "rocker" of 1987 (a year already heralding ours), to that of 2017. On the first appeared a guitarist, more or less metal, sprawled on a bed alongside his guitar, no doubt in the throes of a solid hangover after giving all his soul on stage.

On the second, appeared a smooth and clean young man like a graduate of HEC, quietly installed in front of his Mac, in a tea room where he was probably drinking green tea with supposed detoxifying properties.

As if rock could abstain from any excess.

And Gainsbourg, high priest of this song which he described as a minor art, was in his way much more of a rocker than a singer of variety.

But a rocker from a time when those did not see themselves in the shoes of an employee of Silicon Valley, whose first avatar (of which we should have been wary), was Chris Martin, the singer of Coldplay, Ideal son-in-law with pretty melodies for concept store.

Gainsbourg died 30 years ago and no doubt, from where he is, he roughly holds out a mocking index in the direction of his woke scorners, hilarious at the idea that Aya Nakamura is being celebrated for her ability to reinventing the language with borborygmes and even more by seeing Julien Doré, for a few ironic tweets - and quite funny indeed - designated as his worthy successor.

Because he will not have a successor, as long as the time will be content to enter the artist's room before contemplating his work, as long as the creation is jointly supervised by small-footed Torquemadas and marketing advisers. .

Only a few rappers - some of whom we listen to by the way - are now granted all the licenses, since most of them belong to these new damned people of the earth presumed to be celebrated by kids bottle-feeding moraline, whose status of victims in essence is a necklace of immunity.

Source: lefigaro

All news articles on 2021-03-03

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