"I'm not so sure of what it means to be a woman even though I am one…I'm just trying to deconstruct a bit, because I think at some point tropes of gender felt a bit narrow to me." "I'm saying that I'm fluid because I do believe that my femininity is made of, you know, hints of masculinity and made out of doubt and hesitations," he told BBC Newsnight. That approach yielded machismo-filled hits like the funk-driven "Girlfriend" (and its West Side Story -esque music video), and album opener "Comme Si," on which Chris declares, "There's a pride in my singing/ The thickness of a new skin/ I am done with belonging."Īt the time, Letissier had begun publicly identifying as both pansexual and genderqueer while still maintaining a grasp on his female sex assigned at birth. I wanted to experiment with a tougher, more aggressive sound." "The first album was about a young, queer girl who was a bit melancholic, but now I'm flexing my muscles. "Every masculine hero narrative I could find I wanted to steal for myself and twist to my size," Letissier said in a profile for The New York Times at the time. As the titular Chris, the singer chopped his hair off into a slick pompadour and donned a rotating wardrobe full of button-down shirts, wide-legged trousers, and expertly tailored suiting. Back then, Letissier self-identified as a woman and was using she/her pronouns - aligning with the feminine moniker in his stage name - and was presenting Christine's androgyny as something of a performance-art spectacle through early songs like the above-mentioned "iT," "Saint Claude," and "Tilted."įor Chris, his 2018 follow-up, Letissier introduced another layer to his stage name and persona. In fact, it's no exaggeration to say that the French singer is an entirely different artist from the queer female pop star introduced on 2014's Chaleur humaine (which received an English language re-release the following year as Christine and the Queens ). If his candid thoughts are any indication, Letissier's journey of self-discovery has been a long and winding one. Finally, oh my god! It took the time it took, huh?" "I'm in therapy now and I gender myself right. PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE also represents a complete evolution from the version of Letissier who emerged as a promising star in the indie pop sphere nearly a decade ago. The elysian result is rich and revelatory at times, heady and hypnotic at others. The passion project - a concept album in three parts, heavily inspired by Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize and Tony-winning 1991 play Angels in America and the 2019 death of his mother, Martine Letissier - is an operatic tour de force eschewing traditional pop for a sprawling, visionary quest told over 20 tracks and 96 minutes. (On "iT," the opening track of his 2014 debut album, he memorably sang, "She wants to be a man, a man/ But she lies/ She wants to be born again, again/ But she'll lose/ She draws her own crotch by herself/ But she'll lose because it's a fake.")īut PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE, his fourth full-length due out June 9 via Because Music, is a different beast altogether - both a departure from the synthpop-drenched albums that came before it and an immaculate expansion of his uninhibited songwriting. The artist born Héloïse Letissier has always had a flair for the avant garde, pushing boundaries and exploring themes of identity in his music. "They killed pop music with high capitalism. "It's dead to me," Christine and the Queens says of the classic pop song structure.
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