Word: gainsbourg
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...most intimate track on the album is "IRM" - that's French for an MRI scan - which pulsates with clanging industrial beats. In 2007, Gainsbourg suffered a brain hemorrhage in a waterskiing accident and surgeons had to drill through her skull to save her. Despite recovering fully, she insisted on undergoing MRI scans for several months after the accident. "The sounds inside the machine are nasty to hear," she says. "They're brutal and aggressive, and rhythmically very chaotic. But they're also musical." The lyrics on "IRM" address her attempts to exorcise her medical demons: "Leave my head demagnetized/ Tell...
...part of her recuperation, Gainsbourg also accepted a role in Danish director Lars von Trier's controversial thriller Antichrist, which she filmed in between sessions with Beck. In the movie, she plays a woman who descends into madness after her infant son dies: she bangs her head against a toilet, masturbates naked in a forest and mutilates her own genitals. "The film was so dramatic and so extreme that it took all my thoughts away," she says. "It helped me recover." Von Trier still struggles to reconcile her raw performance in the movie with her soft-spoken manner in person...
...Gainsbourg doesn't have a straight answer, but she says the graphic scenes didn't faze her. "I felt more naked crying and howling than I did showing my bottom," she explains. Then again, her father did give her an early education in provocation. His infamous 1969 duet with Birkin, "Je T'Aime ... Moi Non Plus," was banned by the Vatican because of its salacious lyrics and feigned orgasms. And in 1984, he recorded "Lemon Incest," a duet in which he and a 13-year-old Charlotte sing that "the love that we will never make together is the most...
...daughter," she says, defending the song all these years later. "There was a lot of shyness about frankly saying, I love you. My father would say it to other people and through song, and wanted me to know it through other people as a public thing." (Read about Serge Gainsbourg in the pages of TIME...
...Gainsbourg doesn't stir controversy on IRM, but her father's influence can still be felt. By pursuing a highly personal and unconventional musical path, she pays homage to his legacy. And, as he would have wanted, she's creating...