Review: 'Relax Baby Be Cool: The Artistry and Audacity of Serge Gainsbourg'

Serge Gainsbourg didn’t have the most versatile voice in the world and he generally couldn’t be bothered with composing more than a verse and chorus and putting them on repeat, but he made the most of his musical limitations and lyrical advantages. In the sixties, only The Velvet Underground rivaled him for creative exploitation of repetition. For those of us who do not speak French, Gainsbourg’s gift for withering wordplay is lost, but there’s something about his monotone, sneering delivery that conveys all the cleverness and sleaziness that made him a superstar in his home country. There’s certainly no mistaking what’s going on once he starts grunting and Jane Birkin starts groaning in his signature provocation “Je t’aime … moi non plus” even if we miss the subtlety of lines like “Je vais et je viens entre tes reins (trans: “I come and I go between your kidneys”). I was so convinced that Gainsbourg was a wry comic genius and that perusing his lyrics would be more titillating than a metric-ton of dirty magazines that a few friends and I tried to learn French just so we could translate his songs when I was in my twenties (we did not get far).

Because Serge Gainsbourg’s predilection for provocation was as much a part of his life as it was a part of his art, his art sometimes played second fiddle to a life that involved such infamous moments as burning a 500 franc note and telling Whitney Houston he wanted to fuck her on TV. Jeremy Allen does not ignore those theatrical monkeyshines in his new book Relax Baby Be Cool: The Artistry and Audacity of Serge Gainsbourg because they were a genuine part of Gainsbourg’s artistry, which could be troubling indeed. As great as much of his work was, a lot of the shit he pulled would never fly today. Try writing a song about the frustration of not being able to have sex with your own pre-teen daughter today. You’d be ruined. You sure wouldn’t get a smash hit with it, as Gainsbourg did in 1984. 

 

Because so many of the things that made Serge Gainsbourg famous now appear reprehensible viewed through twenty-first century eyes, Allen has to walk a fine line in discussing the artist’s career. Allen does it the way it should be done: by being honest about both the talent and the problems. He also writes a book about music the way I wish more writers would. Instead of stepping back for a stiff academic assessment, Allen allows himself to enter the narrative, follows a flow of ideas rather than strict chronology, and steps away from the mic to allow others (including Gainsbourg’s daughter Charlotte and former partner Jane Birkin, Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker, Bad Seed Mick Harvey, Anna Karina, Mike Patton, and Mark Lanegan of Screaming Trees) to comment on Gainsbourg’s artistry. This makes Relax Baby Be Cool a personal, unpredictable, and consistently engaging look at some very personal, unpredictable, and engaging music.