“For me it’s dead,” Christine and the Queens say of the classic pop song structure. “They killed pop music with advanced capitalism. They infected the melody.”
Born Héloise Luteissier, the artist has always been avant-garde, pushing boundaries and exploring themes of identity in her music. (On the opening track of his 2014 debut album, “iT,” he memorably sang, “She wants to be a man, wants to be a man/But she lies/She wants to be born again/But she loses wow/she draws her own crotch/but it’s fake so she loses”)
but paranoia, angels, true loveHis fourth full-length, due out June 9th on Because Music, is both a departure from his synthpop-filled albums and a perfect extension of his songwriting freedom. An entirely different beast.
The Passion Project — a three-part concept album heavily inspired by Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony’s winning 1991 play angels of america And with the passing of his mother, Martine Letissier, in 2019, it eschews traditional pop and is a powerful opera about a vast and visionary quest over 20 songs and 96 minutes. Elysian results are at times rich and revelatory, at other times engrossing and hypnotic.
paranoia, angels, true love It also represents a complete evolution from Letissier’s version, which emerged as an up-and-coming star in the indie pop world about a decade ago. “It changed me, really changed me,” Letissier says of the album. “I’m in therapy now, and I’m gender-identifying myself. I’m there now. [Laughs.] Finally, what! It took a while, right? ”
If his candor is any indication, we can see that Letissier’s journey of self-discovery has been a long and winding one. In fact, it’s safe to say that this French singer is a completely different artist than her star of queer female pop featured in the 2014 film. human warmth (It was re-released in English the following year. christine and queens). At the time, Letissier was self-identifying as a woman, using her pronouns to match her stage name’s female name, and through early songs like the aforementioned, performed Christine’s androgynousness in her art. was presented as something like a spectacle of iT”, “St. Claude”, “Tilted”.
for Chris, in its 2018 follow-up, Letissier introduced another layer to her stage name and persona. As her titular Chris, the singer shaved her hair off for a sleek pompadour look and donned a rotating wardrobe full of button-down shirts, wide-leg trousers, and expertly tailored suits.
“Every masculine hero story I found I wanted to steal for myself and make it my size,” Letissier said in his profile. new york times at the time. “The first album was about a young queer girl who was a bit melancholic, but now she’s working her muscles. I wanted to experiment with a tougher, more aggressive sound.”
This approach yielded masculine hits like the funk-driven “Girlfriend” (and its west side story-Wind music video), and in the album opener “Comme Si” Chris declares, “There’s a pride in my song / A new thickness of skin / I’m done belonging.”
At the time, Letissier was beginning to publicly identify as both pansexual and genderqueer, while still figuring out her female gender assigned at birth. “I say fluid because I believe my femininity is made up of hints of masculinity, and of doubt and hesitation,” he said. BBC news night. “I’m not quite sure what it means to be a woman, even though I’m a woman…I’m just trying to deconstruct a little bit. At some point the gender tropes feel a little narrow to me.” because I think
Only a few years later, in fact, Letissier has adopted a broad range of pronouns, including they/them, in her journey towards more complete self-actualization. But in retrospect, he still thinks of his first two albums as honest representations of who he was and where he was at each particular moment.
“I feel like I have a better understanding of who I want to be,” Chris told GRAMMY.com. “I started very young, my first album became huge young. Chris is also an expression [of the] I was stretching my nerves, but I was still thinking in terms of the structure of pop, the female body, and so on, and I was suppressing the rest. ”
Early in the 2020 pandemic, Letissier continued to release. new life, an emotional EP centered around the lead single “People I’ve been Sad” and a short film corresponding to its six songs. Her six-track release kept Chris’ theatricality and choreography at the forefront. The visuals for “People I’ve Bee Sad” show Chris dancing with a horned devil on a Paris rooftop just ahead of his Eiffel tour, but he takes it to new depths. Emotions immediately after losing a beloved mother who turns out to be groping.
“There was a real sense of unraveling, it’s true,” he said. NME direct his grief to new life. [The EP] This was the result of a lot of short emotional punches to the face in 2019…going through a lot of deep things while touring for their second album and the tension between the tour and the rest of my life falling apart. became intolerable. ”
Red Car The Lovely Stars (Prologue)Multi-Hyphenate’s next full-length, this piece will arrive in late 2022 as the vehicle debuting his latest alter ego, Red Car.And while the album’s title indicated it was a predecessor to what was to come next, Letissier revealed that he was already heavily involved in the production process. paranoia, angels, true love It then occurred to him that the Triptych of Heaven needed a French forerunner.
“It felt like the first prologue I needed to get back to another piece,” he says. red carHe wrote and recorded it in just two weeks with co-producer Mike Dean. “So it’s kind of like a Kubrick movie corridor, where time is limited and you have to work on something post-nucleus in order to actually perform before it’s core.”
In the wake of her mother’s death, seeing a series of red cars on the streets of Los Angeles inspired her to embrace the nickname Red Car, which led Letissier to embrace her transgender identity. I got room.
He details his coming out and the evolution of his relationship with gender in his next book. trend profile Red Car The Lovely Stars (Prologue)was released last November. “My approach to transgender people is not particularly welcoming or reassuring because I don’t believe in comforting people who have experienced any kind of death.
“My talk is about tolerance and collective disintegration,” he continued. “I want my body to stay as it is. And I hope so for the future.” Generations have uprooted this dualistic, capitalist approach to human life…red car This is a picture of what I’ve been through. ”
So, if (prologue) While this work was a glimpse into Letissier’s artistic and personal transformation, its successor sees the rest of his story unfold in all its seraphic brilliance.
“Through the light, remember. Listen, my baby. Welcome to the story of the story. Welcome to your own light story, my child. Welcome to the light,” sings Letissier in the bombastic “Overture.” . paranoia. “From my point of view, everything is great.”
With this declaration, the artist actually threw the quintessential pop rulebook out the window, revealing his lack of interest in looking back. “I feel like pop music’s over-rationalization of efficiency kills the fun a bit,” he says. “We work on a very narrow scale and very evenly spaced. We are looking for efficiency and we wanted to be truthful. Kui. ”
The result is 96 minutes of gorgeous, dense and powerful music that simultaneously achieves grandeur and complexity in both composition and performance. Chris layers medieval harmonies on fantastic, dreamlike soundscapes. He welcomes a visit to heaven and, as he ponders the unseen, he processes his grief over his mother’s death and seeks transcendence to serve what the ‘unseen’ demands.
Madonna – he also calls him ‘Metatron’, ‘Metatron’ with respect. Kui“” and “Angel of Transformation” play prominent roles in multiple tracks as an all-knowing and ambiguous character called One Big Eye.
Tapping into the album’s lofty narrative, Lutissier describes Madonna’s One Big Eye as either a “loud simulated voice,” an “angel in disguise,” or “a voice speaking from afar,” the voice of his late mother, or the Divine. says that. Mary herself, or better yet, all of them at once. (070 Sheikh also embodies her own angelic character. angels songs “True love” and “Let me touch you once”).
According to Letissier, such an extreme creative process was unlike anything he’d ever experienced before, and the brink had pushed both his practice as a musician and his ability as a vessel for his music. It is said that he began to have doubts. Receiving.
“At some point, I remember being so forgetful of my voice and my potential that I thought, ‘I might be crazy too,'” he says with a wry smile. “And I actually asked the shaman, ‘Am I actually becoming lucid or am I just going crazy?’ She said, ‘Both Hello, because the multiverse is real.”
Soon, songs like “Tears So Soft,” “He Was Shining Forever, Son,” and “To Be Honest,” were often written and inspired in one go, early in the morning. Arrived as a ration bolt. In retrospect, Letissier says that experience turned him into a “crazy prayer” and almost devoted himself to spiritual practice. “I have never internalized my practice so much. I went crazy. I felt possessed. I lost my sociality. The craziest thing was happening to me, very thin, very structured, and I was praying alone that day.
“And the funny thing about this artistry for us is that most of the time we think we have to be brave,” he continues. “Not only must we be skilled, but we must also be brave.
Thankfully, the singer speaks of her fanatical dedication to her creative endeavors. paranoia, angels, true love It brought him to some kind of healing and brought him closer to his mother’s spirit.
“It was a terrifyingly extravagant feast. It felt haunted,” he confesses. “But beyond that, I felt blessed. Sometimes I felt like I was remembering her voice through my voice. It felt like she touched the song itself.” There is a song called “I met an angel”. When I wrote this, it said, “Open your heart, my love.” you also. ‘She’s talking,’ I thought. She’s telling me that she can be me and she can just be a musician. That man. ‘
“Losing a loved one is, of course, a painful and terrible experience, you also“But the great thing about the love being so deep is that she found a way to take care of me through magic,” added Letissier. I believe so. I’m not afraid to even say that I talk to her almost every day. I feel like she called me “my son” when I got to know myself better. Well, that’s how I feel…you never break a bond. ”
Now on the verge of sharing paranoia, angels, true love Together with the world, Lutissier has not only reached his true self, but he understands how every step, every song, every album was necessary to get him to where he is.
“The good thing about me is that I’m a consistent person,” he says. “I was honest the whole time. What saved my ass from my self-loathing in therapy was about realizing how blind my condition was, but the music was there all along, “In my practice, I was a loyal mother lover. My big mistake was telling people this was a performance.” ”
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