“I don’t love you either”; “chic underwear”; ” exactly under the sun “. Many of Gainsbourg’s expressions have nourished the French language. The singer-songwriter had nourished himself with literature as much as art and pop culture, recalls the exhibition “Serge Gainsbourg, the exact word” at the public information library (BPI) of the Center Pompidou. The private collections on display, loaned by Charlotte Gainsbourg, will be found in the museum dedicated to her father, which is due to open its doors this year in Paris.
Books, manuscripts and press clippings, words covering the walls from floor to ceiling, a dandy posing at home in the middle of his works, the Beaubourg exhibition could suggest that it honors a writer. A succession of inky black rooms, like the walls of his home on rue de Verneuil, opens through his library: Alphonse Allais is friends there with Snoopy and Charlie Brown of the Peanuts, Adolphe of Benjamin Constant neighbors there with Marilyn Monroe, Miles Davis crosses paths with comic book characters Placid and Muzo, Jodorowsky finds a place near Maupassant.
Stir words with romanticism and fever
Gainsbourg read, devoured books, one suspected. One does not write 550 songs with poetic and striking formulas, one does not brew words with such romanticism and such fever without having frequented Rimbaud and Baudelaire, Shakespeare and Edgar Allan Poe. More unexpectedly, Gainsbourg worked with furious stubbornness. A relentlessness in twisting the sentences to make them sparkle better, in seeking the most sonorous and finest rhymes, this is what his drafts show.
Serge Gainsbourg’s manuscript on his song Ford Mustang, released in 1969. / Gainsbourg house
From his crossed-out manuscripts, punctuated with lists of rhymes, aphorisms chosen then crossed out, emerges the image of a workaholic hiding his obsessive search for the right word behind the apparent ease of a false flippancy and true provocative. The song, which he decried as a “minor art” during a famous televised dispute with Guy Béart, this scholar took it much more seriously than he wanted to say. “We notice that his work is infused with all his literary references, never paraphrased but always present”, points out Anatole Maggiar, one of the curators of the exhibition.
“He was ultra-cleaving during his lifetime”
“He was the first to revitalize the French language so that it sticks to music such as Anglo-Saxon rock”, he adds. The caesuras of “Under no pre/text/I don’t want/to have a re/flex/unhappy”, of the song How to say goodbye to you, performed by Françoise Hardy; Brigitte Bardot’s onomatopoeia in Comic Strip ; funky beats from the album Love on the Beat ; the reggae inspiration Marseillaise,To arms and so on ; Jane Birkin’s French/English on Baby Alone in Babylone attest to the linguistic modernity of the artist who died in 1991.
“Gainsbourg, as heir to Boris Vian, set himself up as a scout for all the trendsexplains Sébastien Merlet, one of the curators. He was ultra-cleaving during his lifetime. He chose controversial themes: feminicide in The Man with the Cabbage Headmisappropriation of minors… But if he is still present today, it is because, beyond his provocations, he accompanies the societal movements at work, from the sexual revolution to nationalism…”, he analyzes.
“I am a living myth”
Catalyst of the debates of his time, the artist – and his double Gainsbarre – caused a lot of ink to flow. The abundance of press clippings using his titles, which the artist kept at home, proves it. ” The title I love you too has been used 2,300 times by the press, in a wide variety of contexts”, emphasizes Caroline Raynaud, commissioner for the BPI. The cross wrote it again on its front page of January 24, 2023!
His formulas, known or forgotten, can be heard in the disc taken from the show of the Comédie-Française Les Serge (Gainsbourg full stop), where actors interpret songs and excerpts from interviews. We find there his scathing humor, his dubious provocations and other scathing repartees. “I’ve never been misogynistic, I’m modest”, he declares to a pugnacious journalist.“But not very tender”, she replies. “Not very tender! You think that with my face, I can be tender? », he justifies himself. Another dialogue sees the artist, questioned about his fame, ironically: “I’m a living myth, it’s a few degrees above a star. »
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words and notes
♦ The exhibition : “Serge Gainsbourg, the exact word”. From January 25 to May 8, 2023 at the Center Pompidou in Paris. Concerts on February 20 and March 13.
♦ Books : Serge Gainsbourg. to write, to write, by Pierre-Julien Brunet, PUR, coll. “Epures”, 128 p., €9.90.
The Small Papers of Serge Gainsbourg, by Laurent Balandras, Textual, 528 p., €59.
♦ The disc:The Comédie-Française sings Gainsbourg. According to the show The Serges, (Gainsbourg point barre)directed by Stéphane Varupenne and Sébastien Pouderoux, an Alpha Classics/Outhere Music CD.
♦ The museum : Maison Gainsbourg is due to open in 2023, rue de Verneuil in Paris.