La Javanaise

Serge Gainsbourg wrote "La Javanaise" for Juliette Gréco and it is perhaps his most purely beautiful song — a waltz in the old Parisian manner, deceptively simple, built around the repeated internal sound of the syllable "j'avais" (I had) embedded in the word "javanaise" itself. Gréco sings it with the particular quality she alone possessed: intelligent, slightly cool, not withholding but never performing vulnerability either. Her voice is low and precise, the words landing with the clarity of someone who understands that chanson is literature first. The arrangement is a light, swaying orchestra — strings, a little brass, the ghost of an accordion — that moves with the effortless momentum of a river current. The lyric is a lover's game, a seduction conducted through wordplay, desire wrapped in linguistic pleasure. The title word doesn't mean anything; it's there for sound, for the j'avais echo, for the pleasure of a mouth forming the shape. Gainsbourg reportedly said it was the most technically perfect thing he'd written. There is an unselfconscious elegance to the recording that belongs entirely to mid-century Paris, to a world before pop music industrialized emotion, when a song could be genuinely witty and genuinely romantic at the same time and the listening public understood both registers. This is a late-afternoon song, a second glass of wine song.