Art And Pornography: A Serious Investigation

JANE BIRKIN, SERGE GAINSBOURG, AND CERRONE

I was chatting, some years ago, with the woman who was my boss at the time. As I acquaint you with the rest of this anecdote, I will keep the boss’s name confidential.

Now, any time I decide to keep a colleague’s name confidential, you can bet that leading up to the decision there was a battle between two fundamental aspects of my character:

1. My passionate love for gossip

2. My terrible memory for names

Sooner or later, every aspiring reputation-wrecker must wrestle with this hard truth: you can’t wreck a reputation if you can’t remember the person’s name.

There are always people eager to help you kick a successful person TO the curb, or OFF a pedestal, but these volunteer kickers are not going to do all the work for you. They’re up for some self-righteous kicking, sure, but they do need to know which direction to aim their foot. Who are you referring to, they always ask, and they’re not going to be satisfied if your answer is “I can’t remember her name, but I seem to recall it had a lot of Gs in it. Or Rs.”

So, this boss will remain anonymous, for you and me both, sister. On the day in question, I found myself in the mystery woman’s office, with its impressive wood paneling, and she was listening to music on satellite radio. She was just getting to the point of telling me that her door was always open, which tends to mean “please leave through it,” when an infamous Jane Birkin/Serge Gainsbourg single came on.

This record was released in the swingin’ sixties. It was very catchy, but interspersed between the pop hooks was a new sort of hook; from the sound of things, Jane and Serge appeared to be fucking in the recording studio. (Or, for the more genteel among you— “pitching woo.” Or, for those of you in the middle— “gettin’ biz-zay.”)

French disc jockeys refused to play the scandalous single on the radio. “Zere ees a limit to even our famous Gallic permissiveness,” they would say, if asked.

So, naturally, it sold acres of copies. The country’s vinyl reservoirs dried up overnight, and record stores couldn’t keep the single in stock. Customers would form a ring around a clerk, pulling their berets off in an agitated manner and shouting, “do you have zees record?”

At the height of the fever, a Life magazine photographer got a famous shot of Parisian record store employees fending irate customers off with day-old baguettes.

I was just about to mention to my boss that I was a fan of Serge and Jane, when Jane started moaning. And, to be clear— she wasn’t just moaning; she was moaning in French.

As a trained musician, I was of course focused on the lovely string arrangement. But my interlocutor, less concerned with the world of aesthetics, heard the moaning and the French, got a look on her face, said “Ugh. No,” and switched the radio off. She did this with an abrupt snap of the wrist, making the moment feel slightly dramatic.

As an open-minded man of the world, I argue that records like this are about something beautiful and sacred— the love between two humans. And people argue back, “okay, but why does it always have to be the love between a naked woman and a guy in a kimono with a creepy mustache?” And I argue back at them that this is a generalization, and Serge usually wore stylish long-sleeve button-ups, but no dice— the damage is done.

I recently read two substack essays about the use of sex scenes in fiction. They weren’t really essays, they were polemics. One was dumb, and the other was smart, but irritating. (Those are the two main types of polemics, and substack readers seem to be divided on which type is better.)

The gist of the argument for both polemicists was that sexual details are titillating, so they can’t be artistic. I don’t know why it’s artistic to stir up our other emotions, but not the sexual ones, but everybody seems to agree on this double standard.

So I find myself asking— is it so terrible for art to occasionally take a short break from stirring up legit emotions like loathing and anger, and just give us a little sex? Even if I concede that sex isn’t legitimate artistic material, I must protest that there’s a difference between the work of an artist who chucks in some sex, and a pornographer who chucks in no art. Some writers are down to chuck, and some are not, and the two are not the same.

In the first place, books designed solely to appeal to our prurient juices never give us any real novelistic interior for the two people in the scene. In fact, it’s not usually two people at all; these books are about physics, of course, but they’re also about statistics.

In non-artistic sex fiction, a proactive gal named Meaghan (with an H) manages to go to town on an entire triple-A baseball team. And not just the players; in the interest of thoroughness, she includes even the water boy and publicist. And I find myself distracted by the logistics; who the hell is handing out water, or sending out press releases, while those two clowns are corking their bats and sliding into home plate?

And are we really expected to believe that these guys hit a home run every time? Sometimes a man bunts, is all I’m saying.

Getting back to music: I suppose that Serge Gainsbourg isn’t for everyone. His louche persona, and the fact that he had quite a few years on Jane, will always be “le turnoff” for some modern customers, and the lovely string arrangements won’t sway them.

So, in a world where Serge is a bridge too far, there is no place at all for a discussion of the work of a man like Cerrone. Cerrone makes Serge Gainsbourg seem tasteful. Almost literary.

Cerrone’s single “Love In C Minor” made pop music history, kicking off the trashy Eurodisco phenomenon with a trashy sixteen-minute opus. The first minute is a group of women talking about how they’d like to have sex with this gentleman they’ve noticed in the discotheque. Then the drums start, with the kick drum hitting four beats to every bar, and the wah wah guitar going wacka wacka, and the women are still talking. The fellow oils over, and he says his name is Cerrone. They ask where he’s from, and he says, “somewhere.” (That’s my favorite part of the record.) They ask what his star sign is (it was 1976), and things proceed from there.

A few stats: the extended version of this single is longer than Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and also longer than Nixon’s Checkers speech. It has a lot more moaning— and more moaners— than the Jane and Serge record, but even though it’s a Eurodisco record, the moaning is in English, and thus sounds phony. Against that, we all must admit that the string arrangement is very effective, and the breakdown with triangle and bongos is managed about as well as that sort of thing is ever managed.

Cerrone’s record was banned, but it was a different decade, and it took more to get a record banned in 1976. The picture sleeve was what really caused the fuss, this time around. Cerrone was pictured, and that didn’t bother anyone, but the woman he was photographed with was completely nude, except for a headband. Outside of this picture sleeve, I’ve never seen a naked woman wearing a headband, and I can see why this outraged people.

For journalistic purposes, I’ve studied this photo at length over a period of weeks, and I’m confused by why the consenting pair is seen seated next to a bunch of clothes that are casually strewn about. Are they supposed to be the clothes the naked woman just oozed out of? I’m not buying it; one woman couldn’t have been wearing all that stuff, and besides, the clothes all look like they were just taken out of the drier and folded, and then carefully placed on the floor. If the photographer was trying to create that “strewn-about” look, he failed. My guess would be that this photographer never lived in a frat house.

Here is an excerpt from Cerrone’s record. There are 13 minutes after this, on the extended version.

Big jim sullivan also played on alone again naturally