Are You Experienced?: Charlotte Gainsbourg & Beck - "Hey Joe" (Pitchfork Premier)

It's kinda funny, because I just finished showing my beautiful girlfriend a few "Bonnie & Clyde"-era Serge Gainsbourg tracks just the other day, which I bookended by saying that his now-grown-up daughter Charlotte recorded a couple albums-worth of material with mid-90's Slacker-Hop kingpin Beck "Loser" Hansen; and now, today, by sheer coincidence, here's a new Charlotte Gainsbourg & Beck track, "Hey Joe" (a sultry Hendrix cover). It's from the soundtrack to often controversial film director Lars von Trier's hyper-sexed-up piece, Nymphomaniac. Gainsbourg seemingly stars as the leading lady in said art-film, which'll debut in two separate parts across select North American theatres, between March 21st and April 18th. Here, "Hey Joe" has gotten a breathy, semi-haunting re-work that still retains the Blues-Rock backbone of Jimi Hendrix's highly popularized 1966-67 cover. It has Beck's signature half-assed guitar-bass fingerprints smeared all over it, as well as his self-contained sparse pro[re]duction work.


Charlotte Gainsbourg's adult contemporary-tinged "Hey Joe" cover will see a December 16th digital release, ahead of Nymphomaniac's December 25th world premier in Denmark; Lars von Trier's latest film co-stars Gainsbourg alongside all-stars like former Disney tween Shia LaBeouf, Christian Slater, Willem Dafoe, Jamie Bell, Uma Thurman, and Stellan Skarsgård (Thor 2). IMDb's self-contained Nymphomaniac: Volume 1 page briefly describes the art-film's underlying plot as "a self-diagnosed nymphomaniac [Gainsbourg] recounts her erotic experiences to the man who saved her after a beating," across eight inter-weaving chapters. The short Nymphomaniac micro-trailer featured below is pretty NSFW, but was somehow "accidentally" shown before kids CGI-cartoon flick, Frozen this past week!