Serge Gainsbourg had no great attachment to genre. By the time he came to rock music, in his early 40s, the French star had traced his oblique, provocative course through chanson (French vocal music), jazz, and light pop. He'd made percussive café jams about suicide and given Eurovision popstrels France Gall and Françoise Hardy songs full of blowjob puns. Later on he'd make a rock'n'roll album about the Nazis and a reggae take on the French national anthem. A pattern emerges: Gainsbourg hops from style to style, but with a terrific instinct for finding the most startling content for any given form.
So it's no surprise his rock work-- the early 1970s albums, of which Histoire de Melody Nelson is the first and finest-- was so original. Melody Nelson is a collaboration with composer and arranger Jean-Claude Vannier, who assembled a bunch of top sessionmen for the album. But Gainsbourg and Vannier had little interest in the conventions that had accreted around early 70s rock. Like a lot of 1971 records, Histoire de Melody Nelson is a concept album: Unlike most, it's only 28 minutes long. The songs are lavishly orchestrated, yet the dominant instrument isn't guitar or organ but rather Herbie Flowers' lascivious, treacly bass, playing a seedy, rambling take on funk.
That bass is the first sound you hear on Melody Nelson, quietly tracking up and down in a windscreen-wiper rhythm: Gainsbourg starts talking in French 30 seconds later, describing a night drive in a Rolls Royce Silver Ghost. The album is routinely described as "cinematic," but the music is more of a mindtrack than a soundtrack-- a tar pit of introspection when Gainsbourg's brooding narrator is alone at the record's beginning and end, then giddy and savage by turns as he conducts his affair with the 15-year-old Melody across the short tracks in the album's middle. One of these-- "Ballade de Melody Nelson"-- is, even at two minutes, one of Gainsbourg's most assured and alluring pop songs.
A lot of Gainsbourg's records are hard sells for Anglophone ears-- the music is there to illuminate and pace the man's riotous, sensual wordplay. But Gainsbourg's alliance with Vannier produced a true collaboration: The arrangements seem to respond almost intuitively to the twists in Gainsbourg's language and narrative, to the point where they're carrying as much storytelling weight as the words. Even if your French stops at "bonjour", the music lets you know that this is a record about a dark, obsessional love. On "L'hôtel Particulier", for instance-- describing the sleazy grandeur of the rented rooms where the narrator and Melody make love-- Gainsbourg's voice shudders with lust and dread, and the music responds, flares of piano and string breaking into the song over an impatient bassline.
The actual story of Histoire de Melody Nelson is pretty negligible in any case-- man meets girl, man seduces girl, girl dies in freak plane crash. Melody herself (played by Jane Birkin, Gainsbourg's then-lover) is a cipher-- a breathed name, a ticklish squeal or two, and red hair. The album is all about its narrator: A natural obsessive just looking for an object; introspective before he meets Melody, more so after her death. First and final tracks "Melody" and "Cargo Culte" are musical siblings, with only the wordless chorales on "Cargo Culte" really distinguishing them.
Together these songs take up more than half the record, and when people claim Melody Nelson as an influence, it's almost certainly with this pair in mind. The soundworld they create is like nothing else in rock-- orchestra, bass, and voice circling one another, blending slow funk, intimate mumbling, and widescreen scope. One precedent is the epic soul Isaac Hayes had been pioneering, but where Hot Buttered Soul is full of warmth and engagement, the bookend tracks of Melody Nelson are a trip through far more hostile territories, the black spaces of a man's interior.
Gainsbourg realized he'd made something special-- he named his publishing company Melody Nelson after his fictional muse-- but, restless as ever, he didn't follow it up: His next album was a sequence of pretty acoustic songs, mostly about shit. Herbie Flowers, whose bass is the undertow pulling the album together, surfaced a year later playing on Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side", whose bassline is the first ripple of Melody Nelson's wider pop culture influence. Since then it's been left to others-- Jarvis Cocker, Beck, Tricky, Air, Broadcast-- to pick up this record's breadcrumb trail. But Gainsbourg's dark focus, and Vannier's responsiveness, aren't easily equalled. This reissue on luxuriously hefty vinyl is the first time the album's been released in the U.S.-- a superb opportunity to hear a record that's been occasionally imitated but never matched.
