Serge Gainsbourg - ‘Nazi Rock’

The occupation of Paris during World War II would have commenced not long after Serge Gainsbourg’s 12th birthday, and as a Jew born to Russian immigrant parents, he was forced to report to Nazi officers each day and wear a yellow star as identification. He said later that he literally wore it as a badge of honour, and would pretend he was a “sheriff or marshall or big chief”. That lyric comes from the song ‘Yellow Star’ from his 1975 concept album - Rock Around The Bunker - drawn from his experiences of the 1940s, a kind of French musical Adolf Hitler: My Part In His Downfall. Like the Milligan book, Gainsbourg delights in the darkly comic and wallows in the absurd, with few songs as darkly comic or absurd as ‘Nazi Rock’. Set over a high-kicking, vaudevillian bop, it recreates the final hours of the Sturmabteilung, a Babylonian orgy of sex, drugs, Weimarian rock & roll and crossdressing. The fun never ends, until it does of course, though La Nuit Des Longs Couteaux never occurs in the actual song, so we’re suspended forever in a moment, like those amazing black and white photographs you see now and again of Studio 54. It would have been uncharacteristic of Gainsbourg to have written an explicitly anti-fascist song, though - as he proved over many years - he was eminently qualified in the art of pisstaking.
Jeremy Allen