Histoire de Melody Nelson

Serge Gainsbourg

album cover

The Bedroom Musings of a Hipster Lech

A concept album about taboo love, Histoire de Melody Nelson puts everything interesting about French pop sensualist Serge Gainsbourg (1928–1991) in one place. If the cover photo of a teenager clutching a doll is any indication, the object of his affection is a young beauty. The sound is orchestral, but there's also an intensely cooking, vaguely psychedelic rock rhythm section underneath. Its vocal schemes are the typical Gainsbourg pillow talk: He whispers through rambling, semierotic dreams of the girl, and she appears every now and then just to wistfully state her name—an audio apparition haunting his thoughts.

The follow-up to Gainsbourg's biggest hit—the 1969 duet with Jane Birkin, "Je t'aime, moi non plus," a marvel of talk-singing with some heavy breathing thrown in—Melody Nelson is at once explicit and intentionally opaque, an inscrutable, multihued bedroom reverie that also glances at darker themes of obsession and drug abuse. It's brilliantly arranged, with the orchestra's contours muted just enough so that Gainsbourg's purring voice remains the focus. In the liner notes to a Gainsbourg compilation, the L.A. singer and songwriter Beck described the album as "one of the greatest marriages of rock band and orchestra I've ever heard."

Beck was among the many pop scavengers bitten by the Gainsbourg bug in the 1990s. Hip-hop producers and electronic cut-and-paste wizards seized Gainsbourg's scenes, sometimes just to nab a suggestive phrase like "sixty-nine année erotique." Others, notably Stereolab and the electronic duo Air, emulated Gainsbourg's thick atmosphere, picking up on his ability to subsume all kinds of music (funk, rock, chanson, bossa nova) into a sound that's infinitely alluring and at the same time just slightly sleazy.

Genre: Rock, Vocals
Released: 1971, Mercury
Key Tracks: "Melody," "Ballade de Melody Nelson"
Catalog Choice: Love and the Beat, Vols. 1 and 2.
Next Stop: Stereolab: Emperor Tomato Ketchup
After That: Air (French electronic duo): Moon Safari
Book Pages: 296–297

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Comments:

#1 from Lolo, Miami, FL - 11/07/2008 4:58

“Melody Nelson” should be featured as it’s a timeless, innovative, album that was completely ahead-of-its-time. To this day it’s cited by everyone from Bowie to Placebo to Air to Portishead as an influence. Beck’s “Sea Change” album lifts almost too much from it (not necessarily a bad thing).

#2 from Glen, New Brunswick, Canada - 08/01/2009 12:37

I dunno… I have a copy of this album (which I bought as soon as I saw it in the store). “Ballade de Melody Nelson” and “Ah! Melody” are absolutely, devastatingly, heart-achingly beautiful, and are the reasons why I bought this… for all of their combined 4 minutes. The opening and closing tracks, to me, make up the bulk of the album and seem to have very little to offer in terms of musical composition: just four chords (Emaj, Gmaj, Dmaj, Amaj) incessantly, with only narration. Perhaps I’m missing the point, and the reason why everyone loves these two longest tracks on the album is for the orchestra flourishes and Serge reciting over the top of it all? Of course, ever since I discovered Gentle Giant, I’ve never been one to blindly follow the masses in applauding (or jeering) any given album… but it’s somewhat of a worthy inclusion to the 1000. (...But no Gentle Giant?)

1000 Recordings To Hear Before You Die