Now, I don’t like to brag (as all my millions of fans know) but I’m kind of a big deal on Twitter, and you may make all of the one-eyed-man-in-the-kingdom-of-the-blind references you like, but it won’t change the fact that I’m the queen of the 140-character realm. One of the reasons for my vast popularity and nearly unstoppable power on the platform of choice for the short of attention span is this video: Mylene Farmer‘s L’Amour N’Est Rien or Love is Nothing.

If you clicked to play the video, then how it contributed to my sudden popularity will come as no surprise, for it is nothing less than a striptease in which the chanteuse gets her kit, as they say, if not her rocks, entirely off. For those of you who did NOT click to play the video, we’ll wait while you rush back to do that.

It’s not the first time we’ve featured the Divine Miss MF around these parts (nor even, it seems, the first time we’ve posted this video, although the other version is down). What elevates this from mere cheesecake to feminine empowerment? It’s a fine line, and Farmer walks right up to it, puts her toe across and then snaps it back in a Fosse-like flourish. To me, what elevates it is, as always with Farmer, the lyrics; she is happy to play on her looks, which she knows are exquisite, and use her body as honey to draw the audience in so it’s at least minute 3:20 before they realize they’ve been listening to a song about how women don’t need to be trapped by the old fairy tales of chivalric, perfect love, or the new ones of political correctness. They’re both cages: one gilded, one woven of hemp, and she doesn’t need anyone’s permission to say she’ll have nothing to do with either of them. She is free to say what she wants, free from the need to apologize for it.

Contrast and compare avec: Vanessa Paradis:

And the lyrics: L’amour N’est Rien

Obsessed with the worst

And not very verbose

The least of my sighs

Turn metaphysical

I have in my heaven

Tons of stars

Hanging on my wings

And down falls the angel Gabriel

Obsessed with the worst

A little too physical

The desire to quiver

Is pharaonic

Fed up with asceticism

My life is wrapped in darkness

For me without the tongue

Wihtout sex I get weak

Love is nothing

When it’s politically correct

You like one another

You don’t even know

when you hurt them

Love is nothing

When everything is sexually correct

You get bored

You yell for it to stop

Life is nothing

When it’s lukewarm

It consumes itself

and shakes your blood

In cigarette ashes

Life is good

It’s made of honey

When it’s acid with dynamite

Those who love me, follow me

Obsessed with the worst

And not very verbose

The least of my sighs

Turn metaphysical

I have in my head

Tons of pirouettes

The leap of the angel

Doesn’t seem strange to me

Obsessed with the worst

And not very verbose

To share my laughs

Rather plutonic

I have in my sphere

A greenhouse effect

My blood’s boiling

I’m seething about everything