The image of an oddly seductive, coolly smoking raconteur - one who tumbles into deeply romantic climes with a simple gaze - is something that many artists, unknowingly or not, strive to achieve. Intellectualism -- amongst the towering piles of its lengthy tomes, sharp Kant and Kierkegaard’s plush existential reveries sticking out of them, kind of testaments to evolutionary triumph -- has long been in bed with this sultry idea of what intellectualism might look like, in a concrete sense. The “disheveled intellectual” look, as one might call it, has caught the attention and imagination of the populace. Names like Andy Warhol, Albert Camus, and David Hockney come to mind when picturing this so-called intellectual fashion. One of such ilk was the late Serge Gainsbourg. It’s difficult to pin him with just one label -- provocateur, photographer, painter, poet, filmmaker; always teetering violently between the lines of outcast and pop star.  Musician might also work, since a staggering 500 songs in his discography continue to influence contemporaries and would-be artists. But it was really his image, combined for his virile, bizarre knack for capturing postmodernity and giving an elegant finger to the world while doing so.
Gainsbourg (neé Lucien Ginsburg) was born in 1928 as a Jew living in Paris, his rather placid childhood shook by the occupation of France by Nazis in 1940. The yellow star he was forced to wear as a Juden became fodder for creative inspiration in later life. The Ginsburg family fled to the zone libre in the south of France, to Limoges. After the war, Gainsbourg’s persona began to take shape. Wanting to connect to his Russian roots, and to distance himself from what he believed to be a hairdresser’s name, Lucien became Serge, and his last name became Gainsbourg as homage to the English painter Thomas Gainsborough. He became a painter, disillusioned by his skills – then he turned to making a living by playing piano in seedy jazz bars. It wasn’t until rusing France Gall into singing “Les Sucettes” – an innocent song about sucking lollipops, or at least that’s what Gall thought, until she examined the lyrics closer and was taken aback at the innuendos to oral sex - that he started to plant his provocative and scathing mark in France’s showbiz.
The 70’s were a time of experimentation for fashion, mingling in the remnants of the 60’s – mod outfits, art deco influenced patterns and designs, shift dresses with simple baubles and decorations – with more of a casual fix, involving even shorter dresses, high boots, flared and wide pant legs, and loose blouses. Bondage pants, platform shoes, and pants for women - things at this time were becoming more fluid in the world of fashion, and thus more provocative. Yves Saint Laurent’s Le Smoking tuxedo for women was highly questionable, as pants for women were just starting to be accepted into the mainstream market. Vivienne Westwood conjured up punk rock aesthetics for British sensibilities.
And Gainsbourg exemplified these ideas to an influential extent. Gainsbourg’s initial style in the 60’s, as a burgeoning singer, was tight black suits and short, trimmed hair – not really branching out too much from his boyish qualities. But soon into the 70’s he would fancy the pinstripe suit, making its ridiculous price look contested by the casualness of his whole ensemble, which was often sockless jazz shoes and slightly unbuttoned shirts, as well as a lit cigarette perched in between his fingers. Denim also played a big part in Serge’s wardrobe, and he would popularize the blue jean again for the French (denim originated in France, but America made it popular around the 80’s). He would wear jean suits in ease and style. GQ Style’s Spring and Summer 2014 volume pins his style as “…a singular style that blended extreme elegance with just woke-up-and-need-a-cigarette nonchalance”. Again, this disheveled intellectual look would be his postmodern love letter to tight-lipped, conservative ideas about fashion and traditionalism.
With a hooked nose, a charcoal shaded drowsy gaze, and gangly ears stuck to either side of his head, he was often described as being ugly. In yet, many women felt themselves oddly attracted to him, along with some of the most conventionally attractive models and celebrities of the world. "He attributed his appeal to women to a charmed sense of vulnerability, as well as his baggy eyes, three-day stubble and perpetual halo of smoke from five daily packs of Gitanes," William Drozdiak wrote of Serge in the Washington Post.
Gainsbourg’s longest lasting paramour, Jane Birkin, was actually his primary influence for fashion – she urged him to own that look, and become even more louche. Like Serge, France considers Birkin to be a fashion icon from the sixties and seventies. She was known to have mixed masculinity with her ever-present femininity, though not to an androgynous extent. Girlish shift dresses, jean shorts with stockings and black heels, loose Oxford shirts – a laid back bohemia that encapsulated French fashion as a whole for the time. Jane was also a fan of the blue jeans as well. In fact, she was quoted with saying that she would rather “dress like a man”. She also dressed quite provocatively, exposing her breasts through a not quite obscure shirt or wearing a dress that showed slivers of bare stomach and chest. This, as one might imagine, is something that she was criticized for frequently. Birkin has her infamy not just as Gainsbourg’s lover, but also with a bag of her own namesake, made by the French luxury brand Hermés. These bags go at a starting price of $10,000 and up. Somewhat ironically though, Jane herself used to carry a wicker basket as part of her attire.
Birkin emerged in showbiz as an actress, briefly starring in “Blowup” (1966), and then co-starring in “Slogan” (1969) where she first met Serge. They soon became inseparable, even after an initial tiff between the two. Then ensued a passionate, messy, and tumultuous thirteen-year affair. One of their most infamous moments together was the release of an LP titled “Je T’aime…  Moi Non Plus” (“I Love You… Me Neither”). This little ditty raised an uproar so loud that the Vatican sought to excommunicate the Italian record producer who worked on the song. This particular song featured simulated sex noises, with Birkin sighing and moaning in between choruses. The reaction to this erotic, saccharine, and schmaltzy song was that of disgust, but lurid curiosity. Who had, up to that point, explored sexuality in such a manner through the medium of music?
But it wasn’t just the physical that added to his persona – it was his music. Gainsbourg’s lyrical style is rife with wordplay, puns, sardonic witticisms, and lubricity. For the English-tongued, a lot of it can get muddled in translation but there seems to be, amongst the infinite complexities of our societies, a universal language for good music and good beats.  From chanson (lyric-driven French songs), to songs about a cabbage-headed serial killer (“L’Homme a tête de chou”) and a suicidal ticket puncher, to incendiary reggae, to fast and impatient guitars slinging 80’s American synth pop music to and fro, Serge did it all. A crooner – fitting somewhere between languid singing and spoken whispers. His album “Histoire de Melody Nelson” is considered one of his best works – “Cargo Culte” in particular, a reference to the “cargo cults” of New Guinea who pray for airplanes to crash in order to get a hold of their freight.  In the narrator’s hallucinations, he dreams: “Those bright corals of the Guinean coasts / Where those indigenous magicians act in vain / Who still hope for smashed planes…Having nothing more to lose nor a God in whom to believe / So that they give me meaningless loves / I, like them, I prayed to the night cargo planes / And I hold onto that hope of an air / Disaster that would bring Melody back to me”.
 He never tried to make anything “pretty or sweet, likeable or commercial” and that “he imitat[ed] no-one”, said of Gainsbourg’s music in the newspaper La Semaine Radiophonique in Sylvie Simmons’ book “A Fistful of Gitanes”. It was perhaps the “un-French” qualities of his music that lead him to become a legend of reckless disregard for traditional values in France.
Gainsbourg has been quoted with saying that “For me, provocation is oxygen”, and his antics were especially incendiary for highbrow, bourgeois types. He brought Fantômas out of the woodwork. An antithesis for the all too goody-goody Superman, this French anti-hero ostentatiously butchers his way through high society for no good reason, other than the joi de vivre of it.
Amongst an album with songs of a mostly scatological and erotic nature, nothing was more outrageous than creating a reggae song (“Aux Armes, Et Cætera”) out of the French national anthem “La Marseillaise” – that a Jewish son of Russian immigrants would dare conspire with hashish smoking black Rastafarians in denigrating an emblem of France was too much for some. In a typical “fuck you” response, he bought the original manuscript to “La Marseillaise”. This garnered death threats from the French military if he were to ever play the song in public.
 Burning a five hundred franc note on live TV in an attempt to protest tax hikes, writing a book about an artist who uses his intestinal gases to create critically-acclaimed pieces of artwork. If any outsider of France has heard of Gainsbourg, this is probably what they hear first about him: showing up intoxicated and unshaven on a French talk show with Whitney Houston, in which he unabashedly remarked, “I want to fuck you” in French. The host of the show, in an attempt to censor Serge’s vulgarity, said that: “He says he wants to buy you flowers.”
The more Gainsbourg settled into the role of the depraved pisshead, the less he had to expose his real vulnerabilites. Amongst his peers he was known as a reserved, rather shy man – a pudique: someone who is modest or bashful. But this was before Gainsbarre. As bizarre creative types are wont to do, Gainsbarre was the alter ego Gainsbourg created in his later and last years as a means of personifying his madness, his brackish attitude, and his awful temper while circling downwards in booze and cigarettes. He would say, “Oh, that was Gainsbarre that did that”. To make a fumbling attempt at psychology, his urge for controversy seems to have been compensation for shyness, a kind of smokescreen to prevent real confrontation. He acted the role until he became it, really. While his contemporaries got old and comfortable and sold out in droves, Gainsbourg stayed true to the lunacy and the humor of his work, becoming each year more of a rebel, more of a disgrace, a national institution of pandemonium, cursing and and you just can't help but watch but feel a strange and sad sense of magnetism still there. The fire was still in him.
After his death in 1991, the French president of the time François Mitterrand commented, “…he was our Baudelaire, our Apollinaire… He elevated the song to the level of art.” Stacks of Gitanes (cigarettes)
	The depth of Gainsbourg’s influence has been evident in a wide range of artists – from everyone like Cat Power, Portishead and Sonic Youth, from Beck to Jarvis Cocker, and REM to De La Soul. Mike Patton of the now defunct Lovage payed homage to Gainsbourg by recreating his “No. 2” album cover in his own band’s album “Music to Make Love to Your Old Lady By”. This album features a smattering of references to Serge, and even has