Serge Gainsbourg

Comfortably reclined on the velvet of a purple armchair set into the crack of the world, as in a voyeurism preparing for the strike, fixated on the most decadent, sensual, sticky details, slipping away from the mortification of the universal. The false candor of white trousers, a slender hand toying with a soft lock of hair, the echo of a laugh, limpid and unaware of its own effects.

Stumbling with feigned clumsiness in the antics of play. Elegantly ignoring the context, shining with insolent, adolescent beauty. To seduce. 

“Melody Nelson a des cheveux rouges/ Et c’est leur couleur naturelle”

1971. Decadànce.

Straight from the seats of a Rolls Royce, entangled in the randomness of an encounter that tickles the male mind idly turned toward observing portions of unripe female body, gleaming grace, pulsing fresh energy, regal innocence. Vertigo. Such a powerful vertigo that it inspired a masterpiece.

The stream of consciousness turns the bass into a morbid wink, weaving it into the meshes of an impalpable sonic fabric, stretched out with skillful expertise by a knowing bow, announcing the imminent emotional catastrophe, the missing link between Eros and Thanatos, intoxicated by its own piercing sense of danger (“Melody”). And if the conditio sine qua non of such an overwhelming urge is “Un petit animal… Une adorable garçonne/ Et si délicieuse enfant“, every futile attempt at moralistic indignation, faced with such morbidity, vanishes before the sublime carved into the air by the decadence of “Histoire de Melody Nelson”. Delicate white roses, streaked only by their own inner half-light, before the Unwitting Nymph, gallantly led into the sweetness of the waltz (“Valse de Melody”).

The lucidity that emerges after the senses have been stunned weeps for its own obsession, sun-drenched, as it admits the inescapability of Chance, through the breath that bears witness to life's residual struggle ("Ah Melody"). The Hotel in which to consume the physicality of the mania can only be particulier, a liberty-style ruin, with paintings of Aphrodite and Salome on the walls of the staircase leading to the sins of room 44, Cleopatra's room, with its rococo-style bedposts and a great mirror in which to reflect the churning of the humours ("L'Hotel Particulier").

The spatio-temporal dilation infects the whole record. And we're left almost intoxicated by the distorted guitar of "En Melody", triggered by the tipsy laughter of Jane Birkin. And what remains is nothing but the memory of a sweet disaster, vanished like an ineffable evanescence, leaving behind a memory always too incandescent to hope it might fade, a psycho-physical flashback, bulimic with sensuality, reaching its epic climax in the ecstasy of the final chorus, straight from the Olympus of the Senses, "Cargo Culte".

A unique and unrepeatable work, "Histoire de Melody Nelson" reveals the most humanly true secret of sensuality, isolating us from the moralistic uniform demanded by every religious decalogue, and letting us float upon our own innocent perversions, like the most bewitching and decadent of escapes.

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07/05/2007