Serge Gainsbourg
Love on the Beat

It was fully established, in 1984, that the great French singer-songwriter Serge Gainsbourg was also a great jerk.

However, when a great jerk has spent two decades of earthly life writing fundamental pages about the way music was understood during the twentieth century, you, the public, must forgive even the most obscene gestures.

Love On The Beat is anything but a riddle to decipher. It doesn't require an appropriate predisposition (except for contextualizing the songs by doing a minimal amount of research on the artistic history of who wrote them), you can look at it closely or from a distance, it is a noble raspberry.

By noble raspberry, I do not mean to diminish its robustness; rather, I intend to distinguish it from other episodes present in Serge Gainsbourg's discography such as, for example, the concepts.

Describing the content of this album hints at a new, fresh, and catchy sound search à la Let's Dance or, in any case, related to the kind of dominant 1980s funky sound more than ever in that artistic period. This is regarding the musical aspect.

From a singer-songwriter's point of view, minimalist yet effective writing. The choruses take the lead; relentless, nauseating at times, and perhaps, I add, premeditatedly.

The element of nausea is used by the protagonist against the more rigid and well-thinking segment of listeners. To be clear, Mr. Gainsbourg has already extensively dealt with certain risqué themes even at unsuspected times (Les Sucettes), but he continues among the last artistic groans to play with innuendos.

In Love On The Beat, the omnipresent chorus is accompanied by moans that one can't tell whether they are of pain or pleasure. In Sorry Angel, it touches on suicide, and in Kiss Me Hardy, homosexual adventures. Serge Gainsbourg takes taboos and adds groovy bass lines.

This time, however, the grand finale is truly hard for the French public to digest; Serge and his thirteen-year-old daughter Charlotte sing Lemon Incest.

For the melody, there is a partial electronic reconstruction of Chopin (Étude Op. 10 No. 3 in E Major).

The title of the track is a play on words with the phrase un zeste de citron (a lemon zest) and touches its new wave base with an exchange of affectionate words between father and daughter. A verse goes:

L'amour que nous n'f'rons jamais ensemble est le plus beau, le plus violent, le plus pur, le plus enivrant

that is

The love we will never make together is the most beautiful, the most violent, the purest, the most intoxicating

Charlotte Gainsbourg still usually ends her concerts by re-proposing Lemon Incest and defending her father's memory by confirming that the piece was his usual creative ploy to shock his detractors.