Absent from many lists of the best pop music in history for reasons that remain unexplained, probably because she is French and doesn’t fit the Anglo canon, Mylène Farmer has built several of pop’s greatest hits, such as the colossal Sans contrefaçon, Désenchantée, and Libertine. Every pop fan who hasn’t explored her discography should do their homework. We invite you to participate in the Mylène Farmer forum.
Farmer, who just turned 65 on September 12, has continued releasing albums with varying degrees of 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. It’s rumored that Angèle will be part of the project, though nothing is confirmed. After Confession and C’est à qui le tour, we now have Des lols et des quoi, a track about the deteriorating state of language. “Des lols et des quoi / La langue au plus bas” (“Lols and whatnot / the language at its lowest”), 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?”) sums up the premise of a song that contrasts the “lols” and internet slang with the literature of Ronsard. “Des lols sans littérature” (“Lols without literature”) is also sung, before claiming that language is 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 may not reach the heights of Farmer’s greatest hits, but the production manages to seduce and wrap the listener.
The music video, directed by brothers Thierry and Didier Poiraud, also recaptures the Farmer of grand, high-budget productions. Filmed at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, it sets her in a dystopian society where words are controlled. Farmer and a group of rebels burst into the library to steal a copy of Les Amours by Ronsard, turned into a symbol of resistance. The video adopts the codes of a heist movie and visually it is far more spectacular than one might expect from a song about the “lols.”
It isn’t a new Désenchantée, and perhaps it isn’t trying to be one. But Des lols et des quoi has enough personality, a very well-produced synth-pop sound, and an original concept. And when the ending arrives with “Banger, de ouf, trop top / C’est ouf, askip, chokbar, le seum” (“Banger, crazy-good, super top / It’s wild, apparently, chokbar, the seum”), Farmer turns all that slang into the perfect punchline for her homage to Ronsard.
