Lucky Love, a multifaceted French artist born without a left arm, performed his song My Ability at the opening ceremony of the Paralympic Games.
His performance caused a sensation. Luc Bruyère, known as Lucky Love, an artist born with only one arm, performed his song this Wednesday evening Masculinityrenamed for the occasion My Ability. Dressed in a white suit, he ended the show simply dressed in his white pants, revealing his bare chest and single arm.
“What’s wrong with my body? Am I not enough?” he sang, in English, surrounded by able-bodied and disabled dancers, performing My abilityquite a symbol for him and the para-athletes.
“It was a visceral song for me. I wrote it in one night, in front of my mirror, in my living room,” he said in an interview with France 3. “Above all, I didn’t expect her to become some kind of leader of a cause.”
“It first became an anthem for trans people in the United States,” he explains, “and then it opened up, now it’s number one in Iran, in countries where this song takes on another meaning. The imagery around my arm was able to speak to many men around the planet.”
The song released in 2023 peaked at number one in Ukraine, Poland and Iran.
Faux airs de Freddie Mercury
The artist with the false air of Freddie Mercury had a difficult beginning. Bullied at school because of his handicap, he experienced drugs and the street, and was diagnosed HIV positive at the age of 19. He began dancing at the national choreographic center of Roubaix, then directed by Carolyn Carlson.
A documentary titled Lucky was dedicated to him in 2022, recounting his astonishing and incandescent journey.
Born in Roubaix, Lucky Love has had a thousand lives, between dance, modeling (for Gucci, Dior, or Margiella), theater (with the play Elephant manwith French stars JoeyStarr and Béatrice Dalle), cinema (the French film Blue is the Warmest Color by Abdellatif Kechiche), not to mention performances on the stage of Madame Arthur, a famous Parisian transvestite cabaret. He also danced with Marie-Agnès Gillot, former star of the Paris Opera ballet and choreographer.
“Dance gave meaning. When you’re born like that on the fringes of society, you always wonder why,” he explained last June on France Inter. “And dance gave me a mission. I understood through dance that my body could be at the service of subjects that were totally beyond it.”
“I am very proud of my body, I want to send a positive message about different bodies,” he told France 3, the man who has made his Instagram account a window into his private life.
The thirty-year-old’s first album, scheduled for the fall, will be called I don’t care if it burns (“I don’t care if it burns”). Like a business card or a profession of faith.
“Too bad if it burns”
“That’s a bit how I see life through the spectrum of what I’ve experienced, what you could call trials,” he analyses for AFP. “I have a love for the living that is monstrous and too bad if it burns.”
As a nod, the singer was scheduled a few days ago at Rock en Seine, a festival on the outskirts of Paris, the day after Lana Del Rey’s appearance, who fell under his spell, as evidenced by the American megastar’s social networks.
“My great luck is that Lucky Love became Lucky Love thanks to a great artist called Lana Del Rey who really liked my music and who helped me a lot because she promoted my music,” he savors.
Sam Smith et Jennifer Coolidge
With a nice snowball effect, since other international stars, pop or screen, like the singer Sam Smith or the actress Jennifer Coolidge, followed in the musician’s footsteps to praise her merits on the networks.
“So, in the United States, I feel really celebrated. Paris has become my home because that’s where I started to dream. I think Los Angeles will become my home because that’s where I want to continue to dream.”
LA will host the Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2028, but it is already a reality for the singer who recorded his future album there. “There is nothing like the city of dreams: we went to make the album there also because I wanted to work with American teams. I have always had a great desire for pop and I think Los Angeles allows that.”
To return to its current events, Lucky Love obviously measures the importance of the media coverage of the Paris Paralympic Games in changing the way people look at disability.
“My dream is that one day there will be no more categories and that we can just face each other, that we can just live together because we form a big thing called humanity.”
