Absent for inexplicable reasons from many lists of the best pop music in history, probably because she is French and does not fit into the Anglo canon, Mylène Farmer has created several of the best pop hits in history, such as the enormous ‘Sans contrefaçon’, the enormous ‘Désenchantée’ or the enormous ‘Libertine’. Any pop fan who ignores his discography has to do his homework. We invite you to participate in the Mylène Farmer forum.
Mylène, who just turned 65 on September 12, has continued releasing albums, with more or less success, and on October 30 the next one arrives, ‘Égrégore’. The album takes its title from the idea of a collective spirit created by the thoughts and emotions of a group. Angèle is rumored to be part of the project, although it is not confirmed. After ‘Confession’ and ‘C’est à qui le tour’, now comes ‘Des lols et des quoi’, a song about the deterioration of language. “Des lols et des quoi / La langue au plus bas” (“Lols and what do I know / the tongue on the floor”), Farmer sings in the Song of the Day for today, Sunday.
«Dis-moi, où sont passés les mots?» (“Tell me, where have the words gone?”) summarizes the approach of a song that contrasts “lols” and internet slang with Ronsard’s literature. “Des lols sans littérature” (“Lols without literature”), he also sings, before claiming language as something that goes beyond meaning: “La langue est une langue de textures / Autant que de sens” (“Language is a language of textures / as much as of meaning”). Musically, it is an elegant and enveloping synth-pop. The hook is not at the level of Farmer’s greatest hits, but the production manages to seduce and envelop.
The video clip, directed by brothers Thierry and Didier Poiraud, also recovers the Farmer of the great blockbusters. Filmed at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, it places it in a dystopian society where words are controlled. Farmer and a group of rebels break into the library to steal a copy of Ronsard’s ‘Les Amours’, which has become an object of resistance. The video adopts the codes of a heist movie and is visually much more spectacular than one would expect from a song about “lols.”
It is not a new ‘Désenchantée’, and perhaps it does not intend to be either. But ‘Des lols et des quoi’ has enough personality, very well-produced synth-pop and an original concept. And when the end comes with “Banger, de ouf, trop top / C’est ouf, askip, chokbar, le seum” (“Great song, crazy, super top / It’s crazy, they say, how strong, what a downer”), Farmer turns all that jargon into the perfect punchline for his vindication of Ronsard.
