Heh, Deepwaters, gettin' a nice close look, eh?

Heh. I could say something here, but something tells me I've probably gone too far already. ;)

Yes, I also found the full-on X-rated analysis a little over the top (i.e., not parsimonious in the sense of Occam's razor), e.g., the stuff about the pubic hair and female ejaculation seemed sort of unnecessary. But overall the general thrust (no pun intended) seemed reasonable. I also recall someone talking about the crocuses (and how they were some reference to Mylene) somewhere else (e.g. mf-international?), but I just can't remember what it was all about anymore.

I've often wondered about what contexts and mechanisms need to be in place for a listener to grasp a double entendre or innuendo properly.
When I heard 50 Cent's "Candy Shop" (I'm embarrassed to say in the romantic dinner scene in "Date Movie"), where he says "I'll take you to the candy shop/I'll let you lick the lollipop", I got to thinking about why this sounds filthy, and what kind of frame of mind I have to put myself in in order to understand why it sounds filthy. I mean, he's not using any dirty words. It seems like he's not really even using any words that really have a commonly-understood double meaning (except perhaps "lick", which is still used literally but the subtext is that something sexual is being licked...but maybe my slang knowledge is out-of-date and "lollipop" has a known history before this song?). So, then, why is it clear that he's talking about...well, "gourmandises"? Somehow he (and the listener) have to construct the sexual metaphor, and then the meanings of the individual terms fall into place. Does this mean that we have to "be receptive" to the metaphor before it reveals itself to us, not just at the level of knowing double entendre word meanings, but at some sort of more global level?

BTW, Deepwaters, along those lines, in responding to your comment in the Nabokov thread about how the Gourmandises video makes you feel, I guess the appropriate response along these lines would be: hey, they're just having a pleasant dessert picnic on an extra-hot day (which means they have to be, um, lightly dressed), and playing a nice game of, um...tag (yeah, that's it, tag) and so all the rest of it is, of course, your active imagination filling in the gaps. :D :D :D

I vaguely recall some other thread (maybe on AF?) analyzing the hand gestures in JEAM at some length and concluding that the relevant gestures (think where she's kind of flapping her hands back and forth at hip level) are pretty standard flamenco moves. (That thread had animated GIFs and the whole works.) Are we talking about the same gesture here? Thanks!

My imagination, sir, is indeed very active, and requires little prompting. This serves me well in my chosen creative ventures, but does occasionally generate drawbacks. :cool:

Re the hands in JEAM, although the circular hand movements in the hollow of the hips is suggestive, I was thinking more of the positioning of her hands when they were resting on her body. There's nothing blatant (that would make the dance in very bad taste), but just a mildly naughty suggestiveness. You have to be thinking in terms of the lyrics' double-entendre to see the hint of masturbation, but even without that there's a subtle drawing of attention, along with the hip movements, that goes into making this an incredibly sexy dance. It's really quite well designed, because it does all this without being crude.

Well, after your post, I felt compelled to take on the onerous and thankless burden of scrutinizing a JEAM performance in painful detail to evaluate the veracity of your claim. :D I guess I could go either way on it, though I didn't really see it myself without your prompting. But maybe if I were a native French speaker, it would have stood out more?

Vaguely related to this, I noted on someone's Youtube comment to the original Madonna La Isla Bonita video that there were in fact some very suggestive motions in that video as well.

Also, I wanted to comment that there are a fair number of other songs that have female masturbation as their theme (of course the Divinyls' I Touch Myself, but also Britney Spears' Touch of my Hand, or Toni Braxton's You're Making Me High), so it's not like this interpretation would be ground-breakingly scandalous, right?

Mylène has music videos rated M for Mylène. i'll not name them specifically, interested people can search for them ;)

Deepwaters,
OK, continuing my shouldering of the great burden, I inspected a clip of JEAM on Eurobest (with the long pants) and...I'm starting to see it. The problem is, of course, that I may never again be able to not see it. I also noticed something (which I suppose is easily ascribed to maintaining camera variety), but there were a fair number of head shots, which contributed to a bit of an "Ed Sullivan Show" effect (when Elvis first appeared on that show, his then-scandalous hip-swiveling was censored by showing him only above the waist) .

You know, one thing I thought of when I saw the beginning of the JEAM video was the striptease scene by Paz Vega in Sex and Lucia. I almost wondered if either inspired the other and/or there was a common source. Anyone else notice the resemblance?

I've never totally believed in this analyses of the song. But the problem whith any analyses of a song is that: After reading the analyses it is extremely hard to form your own idea conserning the meaning.
"I may never again be able to not see it" (above).

Thats the strength and the drawback of our minds! We are always looking for connections.

I think Mylène has just infected another thread :D

BlancZulu, you're right. It's hard to have your own interpretation anymore, which is why I occasionally just listen to the sound of her voice, not the words she sings. However, I can't say I dislike this interpretation!

Just another nitpicky thing that's bothering me about Anthony's analysis:

"Qui ne roulent qu'à deuxà l'heure" implies someone going too slow -- not too fast. So I don't see how it could have the meaning he was giving it.