Histoire de Melody Nelson

"Rewind" is a regular feature about our favorite albums of the past.

Among the great sex records - soul masterpieces like Marvin Gaye's Let's Get It On and Barry White's Stone Gon', trip-hop milestones like Portishead's Dummy and Tricky's Maxinquaye, the alterna-folk of Mazzy Star's So Tonight That I Might See and the cool jazz of Miles Davis' Kind of Blue - none boasts such a sophisticated mix of painterly finish and sleazy zeal as Serge Gainsbourg's Histoire de Melody Nelson. This 28-minute album is the sound of sex: lovely and lurid, refined and raw. More generally, though, and more interesting: this is the sound of coupling. Gainsbourg couples orchestral flourishes both lush and grandiose with snarling rock guitars and seething proto-funk basslines, he couples deliciously pompous high art with dead-on and peerless acid-jams, he couples chart-friendly MOR with obscene spoken-word art-rock. In Melody Nelson, Gainsbourg offers up a pop album that defies high society contempt for pop culture by brimming with beautifully refined orchestration as well as a sophisticated album that defies rocker disdain for sophistication by rocking as hard as any challengers. How does he get away with it? Because the result feels so good!

Melody Nelson represents one of those special, rare, miraculous moments in pop culture when an artist whose work is truly transgressive - an artist like Gainsbourg, Scott Walker, Alex Chilton, F.W. Murnau, or Charles Laughton (and, as good as they are, not Radiohead or the Beatles and definitely not Baz Luhrmann) - somehow gets their hands on all the trimmings of the High-Dollar Big-Time Production Company and then proceeds to cook up something truly, deeply fucked-up with said trimmings. I don't mean "fucked-up" as in "experimental" (whatever that means), "artistic," or even "sincere" or "deeply personal": I mean a work which spurns the misconception that for something to have artistic merit it must be defined by "experimentation" or other serious and loftily cerebral goals (all aimed towards making it "good for you") at the exclusion of pleasure. I mean a work which, combining pleasure with some endemic alien element, creates a new kind of pleasure to which we are heretofore unaccustomed. I mean a work which bypasses notions of "sincere" and "personal" art entirely for something deeper - a visionary dip into that realm where the insincere becomes sincere, the personal becomes of no importance, and, ultimately, boundaries dissolve - a work so strange and yet so fully realized it feels like it just dropped out of the sky.

And so, Melody Nelson finds Gainsbourg using the nearly unlimited instrumental means at his disposal with an almost perverse offhandedness. He ladles extra helpings of orchestra and chorus all over everything on one song, but on another has all his session players come in to work just to play two notes at the very end. He casually invents techniques - the cinematic monologue, the simmering string-kissed slow jam, the highly orchestrated ambient passage - that, in later years, would be reinvented by other artists (many of them unfamiliar with him) as the cornerstones of genres as diverse as spoken word, soul, funk, electronica, and chamber pop. As a result, instead of sounding either dated or anachronous, Melody Nelson just sounds timeless, so timeless that new listeners - from aspiring hip-hop DJs to moony indie-rock geeks - pick up copies every day.

But back to the sex. Because it doesn't matter what French words Gainsbourg is really speaking here - we know that what matters is that he's talking about fucking! There's no mistaking it. In the world-weary, languidly sensual gallic cadence with which all of us wish we could speak, he's talking about the first sight, the chase, the conquest, and the loss. Of fucking! What a theme for an album this expensive. How indecorous. How trivial. What a waste of money.

But wait, here's a tangent: in evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond's new book The Third Chimpanzee, Diamond notes that the difficulties of conception caused by the fact that human ovulation is concealed - i.e., that, unlike almost every other mammal, woman don't go into "heat" - makes a very strong case that sex, for humans, fills another evolutionary function other than mere procreation. Whatever that function is, it's fucking - for fun, for love, for zillions of reasons other than to have babies - that makes us human. So it turns out that Gainsbourg's perennial theme isn't so trivial after all. It's timeless, and Gainsbourg treats it as such. It's Gainsbourg's reverence for these timeless human concerns and his willingness to hang decorum and expense and dedicate all of his God-given gifts to the explication of a theme shunned by more "important," "serious," "personal," and "experimental" artists that makes Melody Nelson not only one of the best sex records, but one of the most irresistible, blissful pop artworks ever created.