Quickly interpreted as a reactionary text, “Des lols et des quoi” already contains the clues to the misreading that its clip reveals. With this new title and its imagery, Mylène Farmer actually opposes, in reality, an administered and even censored language to the one she defends: a living and free language.
Has Mymy gone reactionary? Barely released, her new title, “Des lols et des quoi,” the trial of Mylène Farmer restarts. On Instagram, the free magazine Strobo reproaches the singer for “mocking the language of a portion of the youth” and for “reviving an old refrain about the impoverishment of the French language and cultural decline”. Under the song’s lyrics, the site paroles.net offers a similar analysis, describing a “militant” who “watches the French language liquefy before her eyes and who refuses to be silent”, and invoking Ronsard “as a silent witness to a new shipwreck”.
Mylène Finkielkraut ?
It must be said that Farmer, true to herself, has carefully laid out her traps. “Des lols et des quoi, the language at its lowest”, she sings, seeming to lament that words have lost their soul and laid down their arms. In the face of “lol,” “askip,” “chokbar,” “seum” and other slang inventions, Ronsard is invoked, like Joan of Arc by the reactionaries, as if to save literature. The first hint, however: these curious plural “lols,” pronounced by someone who knows Pierre de Ronsard better than the use of “lol.” The awkwardness suits the voice of a guardian of the language who contemplates with horror a vocabulary that escapes him. One might almost hear Alain Finkielkraut cry “Pierre, help!” before the Académie française, from where Aya Nakamura, queen of the free language, emerged during the opening ceremony of the Paris Games to sing with the Republican Guard.
A text with deliberately reactionary overtones, then… provided one considers that the voice speaking is Mylène Farmer’s. But our favorite redhead loves to trap the uninitiated. A few months earlier, “C’est à qui le tour?” faced the same fate: before Julia Ducournau’s clip illuminated its intent, its lyrics were also interpreted as signaling a reactionary turn. Second song, second trial, second clip: this time with Thierry and Didier Poiraud directing, Farmer plays the trick again. The song poses the riddle; the image assigns the roles. And “Des lols et des quoi” announces the game’s rule from its very first seconds: “Under a totalitarian regime, words have been emptied of their meaning. Libraries have become their prisons…”
The Farmer crew
Renault 16, vintage firearms, masked faces: in an urban guerrilla aesthetic that leans toward the 1970s and Baader’s gang, Mylène Farmer and her accomplices arrive at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Richelieu site. In its Oval Room, the same space where Thomas Jolly shot the sequence of his ceremony depicting a love triangle, the choice of location adds a delicious layer to the heist. Cardinal Richelieu is the one who founded in 1635 the Académie française, tasked with giving “certain rules” to the language and making it “pure”. It is impossible not to hear otherwise this enigmatic “Des lols sans l’État” on Farmer’s lips: four centuries later, she comes to Richelieu to free the words.
Inside what has become a prison, temple guards in austere costumes have taken possession of the place. They have barred access to the books in the shelves and are busy censoring the texts or passing pages into the shredder. The word “censure” appears in large red letters on their screens. Shotgun in hand, Farmer arrives to bring them to their knees, hood them, then retrieves a precious volume kept behind a display case. Once outside, she opens it and frees the words. When the police catch up with the censors, their mouths are gagged with tape stamped with forbidden words: “banger”, “de ouf”, “askip”, “chokbar”, “le seum”… that is, the vocabulary that explodes in the song’s finale.
The reversal is complete. Farmer does not pick up the pen to defend words against those who mistreat them: she takes up arms to free them from those who claim to protect them. The “lol” do not threaten the language; they do. The shadow of Fahrenheit 451 obviously looms over this library where books are mutilated. In the clip, keeping the language does not mean keeping it intact. The book protected by the censor does not return behind glass: Farmer takes it outside and opens it to let its words escape in the rain.
Ronsard is chokbar
The explicit presence of Ronsard, unprecedented in Farmer, perhaps hides a calendar game: he was born on September 11, 1524, the clip’s release date (and Mylène’s birthday is September 12: happy birthday!). Baudelaire, himself, can be sensed but also sheds more light. Farmer recalls that French “is a language of textures as much as of meaning”, “carnal” even, up to this “amber sweetness” that condenses several images from L’Invitation au voyage: the “scents of amber” and, above all, this “sweet native language” that speaks “to the soul in secret”.
Great literature is therefore not opposed to contemporary language: it inhabits the same language. This substantially changes the meaning of the final list. “Banger”, “de ouf”, “askip”, “chokbar”, “le seum” do not illustrate the foretold collapse: after having been kept at bay throughout the song, the forbidden words seize control of the text. A language remains alive because it absorbs what its speakers invent, distort, and transmit.
Among them, one word draws attention: “sexy”, which is not a recent slang invention. A few months earlier, “C’est à qui le tour?” opened with the disappearance of sex – “sexy dort” – before questioning the fear of saying or writing nothing at all. The word returns in “Des lols et des quoi,” in the midst of the vocabulary that the censors want to gag, in an explicit reference to Jul: “MF, it’s the S, sexy”. Her signature. The link between the two tracks thus becomes clearer. The first concerns what a given era still allows to say, write, show or desire; the second concerns those who claim to decide which words to use to do so. And in both cases, the same mechanism produces the same misreading: the song initially appears to embrace a reactionary discourse that the clip then reverses.
With Farmer, confusing the singer, the narrator, and the character is a perilous exercise. Her last two singles simply add a rule to the game: to understand who is speaking, you must now wait to see. Exegesis, indeed, but with her, the activity is almost contractual. From Baudelaire to Jul, Mylène does not choose among the inhabitants of the French language. Ronsard is chokbar, Mylène is sexy, the pookie is in the antechamber… When will there be a feat with Aya?
