Mylène Farmer

With “Ainsi soit je…” (1988) becoming one of the biggest chart phenomena of the late Eighties, staying in the French Top 10 for a full 44 weeks, the studio sessions for the follow-up kept getting pushed back. So, while less than a year and a half had passed between Mylène Farmer's first and second albums, for “L’autre…”, her third effort, fans would have to wait more than three years.

The team working on it remained the same: Laurent Boutonnat composes, arranges, produces and plays keyboards, Thierry Rogen programs the rhythms and handles sound engineering, Bernard Paganotti plays bass [note 1] and Slim Pezin plays guitars. Farmer, besides writing the lyrics, brings her face and voice to the project.

Born into a high-ranking family, Boutonnat had a smooth path laid out for him from a young age: his father, a highly decorated figure, held senior positions at the Red Cross and the WWF, while his mother spent decades within French institutions, serving as an advisor and undersecretary in various ministries. This allowed him to study filmmaking and music from childhood, and to secure the backing of RCA even before finding anyone to sing his compositions. It was he who, during an audition, discovered the budding actress Mylène Gautier and decided to hire her before even hearing her sing, won over simply by her looks.

The two discovered they shared very similar artistic tastes, from music to film to literature: among the passions they had in common was an admiration for the unfortunate American actress Frances Farmer, a star of 1930s Hollywood whose career was derailed by a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. Mylène decided to adopt her surname, and from the very first lyrics she wrote it was clear how much she cared about mental health and related issues.

The newly christened Farmer might initially seem like a malleable figure in the hands of her producer, much like France Gall was with Serge Gainsbourg back in the day: on her debut album, “Cendres de lune” (1986), Boutonnat wrote almost all the music and lyrics single-handedly, as well as directing the videos accompanying the lead singles. Starting with “Ainsi soit je…”, however, the lyrics are entirely hers, and from then on she would take on an ever-greater role, eventually composing the music for her own songs too (the first being “Tomber 7 fois…” in 1995), having other directors helm her videos, and finally collaborating with other producers.

She also personally oversees, with support from a few professionals (Sophie Tellier in the Eighties, Christophe Danchaud in the Nineties), the choreography for all her dance numbers, a cornerstone of every one of her concerts and a key part of the imagery surrounding her persona.

These clarifications are necessary to establish that Farmer is an artist with her own vision and perfectly capable of charting her own course: if for a long time she left Boutonnat at the helm, it was out of elective affinity and trust in his artistic abilities, certainly not for lack of initiative. That the singer's contribution is essential is, moreover, easy to prove: aside from Farmer, Boutonnat never produced any artist of note, with the exception of the less-than-thrilling experience with teen idol Alizée. Even in that case, though, it was a flash in the pan lasting barely a couple of albums: even with Farmer writing her lyrics, without Farmer's voice and stage presence the trick couldn't be sustained.

Therefore, even though “L’autre…” still belongs to the era in which Boutonnat firmly holds the reins, one must not make the mistake of considering Farmer merely the face of the operation.

“Désenchantée”, the album's lead single, came out in March 1991 and by the end of April had reached number one on the charts, staying there for nine weeks: it would end up as the year's second best-selling single. [Note 2]

The video, conceived by Boutonnat, is a ten-minute mini-film in which Farmer, dressed as a man, is imprisoned in a concentration camp for boys, where she ends up leading a revolt. After burning down the camp and killing the soldiers guarding it, however, the rebels find themselves wandering aimlessly across a frozen steppe with no trace of civilization in sight on the horizon. The footage runs ten minutes, twice the length of the song: the first minute and a half is filled with a chaotic remix, while the closing credits are set against an ambient music backdrop. These are effective solutions for the video, but it's just as well they don't appear in the version released as a single and later included on the album, since they have no reason to exist without the accompanying images.

“Désenchantée” is a dance-pop anthem with a majestic piano introduction and a trilling orchestral synth line that repeatedly punctuates its progress, now contracting, now expanding. The rhythm section is made up of a drum machine, a synth bass line and an acoustic bass line, alternating and at times overlapping. The iconic chorus is carried by a female choir, whose ephebic character and timbre recall children's voices, by a distorted guitar (kept far enough back in the mix to avoid feeling intrusive), and in the finale by increasingly dense layers of voices.

It's a sumptuous sonic dress, whose epic scale suits perfectly the sense of disorientation described in the lyrics:

Swimming in the choppy waters of tomorrows,

floating in the air, too heavy with near-total nothingness.

Whose hand is there left to reach for?

If I must fall from on high, let my descent be slow

I've found peace only in indifference

and yet I'd like to find innocence again

but nothing makes sense and nothing works.

Everything is chaos, and what's more

all my ideals, rotten words.

I'm looking for a soul who can help me

I belong to a disenchanted generation

Although Farmer has stated that while writing it she had no intention of painting a socio-political manifesto, but only of portraying her own state of mind, those lines became the symbol of a generation and gave a sense of belonging to what would go on to become one of the most loyal fanbases on the French scene.

The album comes out roughly a month after the single, introduced by a cover picturing the singer alongside a crow, a tribute to her passion for Edgar Allan Poe.

The technological gap with the previous album is immediately noticeable: between 1988 and 1991 production methods took a huge leap forward, and Boutonnat wasted no time rising to the challenge. The sound thus moves away from synth-pop and gothic atmospheres towards an electronic pop with ethereal textures, close to dream-pop in terms of tone and to the various shades of club music in terms of rhythm, from the house of the more frantic moments to the downtempo of the more relaxed ones. The latter category includes the opener "Agnus Dei", which with its impalpable vocals, sighs, obsessively repeated Latin title and layers of electronics recalls "MCMXC a.D." by Enigma, released not even five months earlier. Tellingly, both albums also share references to the sexual repression inherent in Christianity.

"Je t'aime mélancolie" is driven by a house piano groove, but moves at just 105 bpm, at a much slower pace than the genre's average, resting on scattered sampled sounds and funky guitars. Here too Farmer's voice moves between singing and sighing, which is why it comes across quite naturally as something close to ambient music at times, left to settle onto the track like an abstract element or a touch of atmosphere. This trait, which is one of her strengths, has also made her a divisive figure: despite her enormous popularity, it's not unusual to run into a vocal minority of critics who accuse Farmer of not being able to sing.

"Psychiatric", the darkest moment on the album, rests on a dense ambient-techno backdrop full of sampled environmental sounds (in particular creaking doors and gates, symbolizing a place of confinement for people suffering from mental disorders) and a couple of English phrases repeated obsessively: "I'm not an animal", "It's easy this time to lose your mind".

"Regrets", a duet with Jean-Louis Murat [Note 3], is a heavenly ballad built on scattered piano chords, layers of floating keyboards, long fretless bass notes, and, starting at 3'19", a synthetic chiming redolent of the Far East, comparable to the style of Ryuichi Sakamoto. The two voices intertwine amid lines evoking natural landscapes perhaps drawn from 19th-century Romanticism, one of Farmer's great passions, and steeped in melancholy:

Far, far from the world

where nothing ever dies

I went on this long, sweet journey

our souls merge with the eternal snows

love has hidden its true face.

[…]

Let's hold on to the innocence and carelessness of our once-thrilling games.

Have no regrets

trust me and think of all the "no way"s

the indifference of the senses

have no regrets

make the promise

you know that winter and autumn could never love each other

If "Pas de doute" moves along the same lines as "Désenchântée", with its triumphant dance-pop, "Beyond My Control" is a dark electropop track built on abstract vocal samples, orchestral synths and hard, industrial-tinged drums.

The album closes with "Nous souviendrons nous", an ambient pop piece for voice and keyboards with no rhythm section, coming within a hair's breadth of the new age of Enya or the more subdued side of Clannad.

On May 10, 1991, "L'autre…" reached number one on the French albums chart, where it stayed for twenty consecutive weeks. [Note 4]

Over the following months three more singles were taken from it: "Regrets" (which reached number 3 and sold 125,000 copies), "Je t'aime mélancolie" (number 3) and "Beyond My Control" (number 8). [Note 5]

If “Ainsi soit je…” is the record that ushers Farmer into the Olympus of French pop, “L’autre…” is the one that confirms it, ultimately an even harder feat to pull off. From then on her career would face no further obstacles: to this day, with over twelve million copies sold, she is the best-selling French female artist at home (to put things in perspective: no other woman has reached ten million).

Abroad she is sometimes billed as “the French Madonna”, a label that actually does her a great disservice: first, because it risks making her look like an imitator of another artist, and second, because the two don't really have much in common. Both have blended dance and pop, both are also dancers, but Farmer is a decidedly more refined figure: her metaphorical, symbolic lyrics carry literary references absent from Madonna's, while her music — far removed from any need to chase every trend at all costs — has moved through gothic and dream-pop atmospheres, even touching on new-age suggestions, with an intellectual approach that if anything is closer to Kate Bush.

Enigmatic, reluctant to appear on television or reveal details of her private life, Farmer managed the feat of becoming the queen of French pop by choosing the hardest path.

[Note 1] Paganotti was the bassist for Magma on albums such as “Üdü ﹐üdü” (1976) and the live trilogy “Rétrospective” (1981), before going on to collaborate on the historic twin records released by Jacques Higelin in 1979: “Champagne pour tout le monde” and “Caviar pour les autres…”. More generally, he is one of the most sought-after session musicians on the French scene, called on by Charles Aznavour, Francis Cabrel, Christophe, Jacques Dutronc, Johnny Hallyday, Bernard Lavilliers, Véronique Sanson and many others.

[Note 2] In 1991 only one single officially achieved platinum status, having sold over half a million copies: Lagaf''s “La zoubida”. Given its rather similar chart trajectory, “Désenchantée” plausibly landed just below that threshold.

[Note 3] Murat is a cult singer-songwriter, little known to the wider public but held in high regard by critics and, above all, by fellow musicians (Julien Clerc, Françoise Hardy, Indochine and Sylvie Vartan are among those who have recorded his songs).

[Note 4] Wikipedia lists the album at over two million copies, but without citing reliable sources. Two more credible estimates have been calculated by Chartmasters and Infodisc, and cross-referencing them it can be established with reasonable certainty that domestic sales exceeded 1.4 million copies.

[Note 5]The three tracks are each accompanied by a video, all directed by Boutonnat. In the one for “Je t'aime mélancolie” Farmer alternates dance steps with a boxing match, while the video for “Beyond My Control”, laden with erotic imagery, remains banned for under-eighteens to this day.

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14/08/2022