In our era of streaming where songs are becoming shorter and shorter, story-based music videos are becoming rare these days. Artists prefer music videos with a flawless cinematography with sequences put more or less coherently together. As she explains in her interview with Karukerament.com, Stevy Mahy was intentional in her choice of representation for the music video of her song “Tout Ce Que Tu Es” [t/n: “Everything you are/All that you are”] with singer LS. The duet gives us a bubble of sweetness following the codes of the current storytelling trend but also the visuals of love music videos from the late 90s and early 2000s.

Transcendental love

In her previous music videos such as Something About You (2010) or Ban Di’W (2014), Stevy Mahy had already staged love through a slice-of-life concept to showcase the intimacy between a woman and a man. This is the concept of "Tout Ce Que Tu Es" in a more accomplished form to illustrate a simple, sober and self-sufficient love. A love that does not need to justify its existence. A woman and a man... Or rather two human beings face to face, without artifice. Two souls allowing themselves to reveal their vulnerability. Two energies that attract each other, that rise together towards the light... Even if such a strong love does not exist, saying that it is possible gives us the strength to face a future that seems so dark and uncertain at the moment. If we don't know what that future will be, we can always look to the past to build on our roots.

Clip-vidéo de Tout Ce Que Tu Es (2019) — Clip-vidéo de *Tout Ce Que Tu Es* (2019)

Love from another time

"Tout Ce Que Tu Es" tells us about a love that transcends space and time. Stevy Mahy and LS even take us to the Guadeloupe of the 40/50s era. It is a Guadeloupe in full social, cultural, economic and political change. The seeds of the protests that will shake the island for the next two decades are sown. But what was the daily life of this generation of (young) adults? This generation that experienced the two wars like the rest of the world, this youth that loved, hoped, continued to struggle to live fully its humanity. I had tears in my eyes at the end of my first viewing. There is no plot, strictly speaking. It's just 5 minutes of affection between two human beings. Time seems stilled as the camera captures moments of shared happiness with a delicate and elegant cinematography.

These images of a tender and affectionate couple... I know, our artists have been delivering for decades. I’m not talking about showing seduction like Tatiana Miath and Tony Chasseur in Nuit de Miel [t/n: “Honey night”] (1994) or showing passion as Annick and Jean-Claude did in Santimantal [t/n: “Sentimental”] (1987). I'm talking about showing love as a spiritual connection with another person. If we look just at the past five years, there are duets like Antonny Drew and Stony's Aimer [t/n: “To Love”] (2018), Tanya St. Val and Victor O with Doucine [t/n: “Sweetly”] (2016) who had music videos featuring slices of life of a happy couple. However, visualizing love through time by travelling through several eras as Jocelyne Béroard does in Lapli Pé Tombé |(=[t/n : “It May Rain”] (2015) is still, it seems to me, rare. The glorification of the austere “famn potomitan” [t/n: pillar woman] and the Caribbean womanizer may explain the lack of representation of a happy black West Indian couple in the current generation of grandparents and great-grandparents. Nevertheless, “Tout Ce Que Tu Es” allows us to conceive such love and makes us want to see this type of representation more often.

"Tout Ce Que Tu Es" by Stevy Mahy and LS