Reception
When the version with Bardot was recorded, the French press reported that it was an "audio vérité". France Dimanche said the "groans, sighs, and Bardot's little cries of pleasure the impression you're listening to two people making love". The first time Gainsbourg played it in public was in a Paris restaurant immediately after they recorded it . Birkin said that "as it began to play all you could hear were the knives and forks being put down. 'I think we have a hit record,' he said."
The lyrical subtleties were lost on late-1960s Brits. What they heard was an expertly stroked organ, orgasmic groans and a soft-focus melody, the musical equivalent of a Vaseline-smeared Emmanuelle movie. It was confirmation that life across the Channel was one of unchecked lubriciousness, and Je t'aime became as essential a part of any successful seduction as a chilled bottle of Blue Nun.
— Sylvie Simmons, Serge Gainsbourg: A Fistful of Gitanes, 2001The eroticism was declared offensive. The lyrics are commonly thought to refer to the taboo of sex without love, and were delivered in a breathy, suggestive style. The Observer Monthly Music magazine called it "the pop equivalent of an Emmanuelle movie."
The song culminates in orgasm sounds by Birkin: mostly because of this, it was banned from radio in Spain, Sweden, Brazil, the UK, Italy, Poland, and Portugal, banned before 11pm in France, not played by many radio stations in the United States because it was deemed too risqué, and denounced by the Vatican and the L'Osservatore Romano; one report even claimed the Vatican excommunicated the record executive who released it in Italy. Birkin says Gainsbourg called the Pope "our greatest PR man."
Birkin said in 2004 that "It wasn't a rude song at all I don't know what all the fuss was about. The English just didn't understand it. I'm still not sure they know what it means." When Gainsbourg went to Jamaica to record with Sly and Robbie, they initially did not get on well. They said "We know just one piece of French music, a song called Je t'aime… Moi Non Plus, which has a girl groaning in it." Gainsbourg said "It's me", and their mood changed immediately.
Read more about this topic: Je T'aime... Moi Non Plus
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
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“To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be made by the reception of beautiful sentiments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)