Many of the best things in life are slippery. Sex is a viscous business, as is sweating it out on the dancefloor. Then there’s the fluidity of all of our individual sexualities. We juggle a diesel rainbow of personas and messy feelings: lust, depression, ambition, wilfulness, to pick just four explored on this long-awaited second album by Christine and the Queens.
“I’m a man now,” declared Héloïse Letissier on iT, a track on her extraordinary debut album, Chaleur Humaine (2016), which sold more than 1m copies and introduced a thrilling new voice in pop. She sang in French and English and a peculiar, inflected hybrid of the two that served the rhythms of her songs more than strict sense. Madonna, one of Letissier’s idols, ended up copying her staging.
Fast-forward to 2018 and the really rude words are now in Spanish (follarse). And “we are all losing to somebody… we are all losers to somebody” – or so Letissier observes on Feel So Good, a track that apes Michael Jackson in the most successful way. This is an MJ reborn in the body of a 30-year-old Frenchwoman hell-bent on kicking the notion of womanhood around until it’s puree. Letissier has written an album all about these clotted fluid dynamics, set to the squelch of 80s funk; the only thing missing from Chris, her second album, is the grease of street food eaten at unlikely hours of the day after some funky bodily exertion.
To still refer to the French pop creative as “Héloïse Letissier” seems a little futile when there are such pressing updates. Apparently only her parents still call her that now. To recap: Letissier became Christine of Christine and the Queens when, a heartbroken theatre school dropout, she moved to London in search of a reason to keep going and was given succour by drag queens: the backstory of Chaleur Humaine.
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
