Second life
MEET FRENCH POP ICON CHRISTINE AND THE QUEENS.
In the music video for Christine and the Queens’ song “5 Dollars”, Héloïse Letissier hypnotically rolls the muscles in her spine, applies face cream with a slap, and ponders her outfit for the day. She settles on an intimidating leather harness, strapped over her tiny chest and hidden behind a boxy suit. She leaves the room, and we’re left wondering what – or maybe who – she’s about to conquer. She has transformed once again.
Héloïse grew up a wildly shy kid. Her parents – Mum a French and Latin teacher and Dad a professor of Victorian-era literature – encouraged her to live an internal life in the company of book characters. Following a break-up and spiral into depression in her early 20s, she wandered into a London drag club. What happened next has become the folkloric origin story of France’s most exciting popstar: a band of drag queens plucked the heartbroken 22-year-old waif out of the crowd and instructed her not to care about other people’s opinions of her. That was the day, she says, that her life truly began.
Héloïse called this new confident, wise iteration of herself ‘Christine’ and, in tribute to the performers who ripped the ennui right out of her, pluralised her stage name. Christine and the Queens was born. “When Christine arrived in my life, it was more of a survival technique than a character for me,” Héloïse explains. “I allowed myself to be empowered for the first time. I put a name on it. Christine is a way I can be extremely fragile and extremely strong, but it’s very much always me.” Her first record, Chaleur Humaine (‘human warmth’), was released in both her native French and English, and has sold more than two million copies since 2014. It made her one of the biggest popstars in France, a country where her beliefs and identity often clashed with the way the music press wanted to handle pop artists. Héloïse is a pansexual woman who was not only inspired to make music with the encouragement of drag queens, but who boldly explores the trappings of gender and femininity in her lyrics and performance.
“In France, there’s a culture where queerness – and even feminism – is really hard to explain with nuance.” Often, she’ll be met with demands to explain the intricacies of gender identity and not asked a single question about her music. It’s an exhausting task. “I’m glad if I can educate, but at some point I felt like I was doing a job I didn’t have to do.”
Four years since her debut, Christine and the Queens is releasing Chris, an album about “hungry, horny women” – a vaguely taboo idea that Héloïse is experimenting with through her presentation as a square-jawed hunk. In videos and live performances, she’s like a gang leader who’s never seen a gang outside of Michael Jackson videos and the finger-snapping Sharks and Jets of West Side Story. It’s all choreographed machismo, reminding us how much of gender is rooted in the performance of confidence and arbitrary visual markers like hair-length.
“By exploring that, I actually got in touch with my femininity; I was showing more of my body as a woman, but with a set of clothes that made it macho. I like how easy it is to subvert gender. It can be just a tiny detail or a way to behave that’s unexpected.”
Emboldened by gender chameleons like Michael Jackson and David Bowie, Héloïse examines these ideas through the lens of pop. “I love working in a format that can be really popular. Because of who I am, what I have to say and how I identify, I’m more like an outsider.” But, given its accessibility, pop music can be the ultimate Trojan Horse: a vehicle for big ideas and scary human truths, hidden inside something unexpected. Like a harness worn beneath a double-breasted suit jacket.