Prepare For Impact
IF YOU LIVE IN ENGLISH CANADA, YOU PROBABLY DON’T KNOW HUBERT LENOIR YET — just a few months ago, his name barely registered in his native Quebec City. Then, in short order: Lenoir dropped his debut album, Darlène, a Hunky Dory- esque glam-pop odyssey that references soul, jazz and French chanson; single “Fille de personne II,” a keys-and-sax jam with an irresistibly charging chorus, was picked up on Quebec radio; and Lenoir was invited to perform the song alongside contestants on the province’s hugely popular TV singing contest, La Voix.
Lenoir’s May 6 performance of the campy earworm — in which the 23-year-old writhed sensuously around La Voix’s stage, grasped at his groin, bountiful black curls and gold necklace, leapt onto the judges’ chairs and, at the end, exposed a butt cheek sporting a fleur-delis — caused something of a stir. The day after his performance, Lenoir found himself at the centre of a storm of online hatred and media commentary.
“People just started hating on me like crazy,” he says. “When I woke up the morning after, friends were writing me like, ‘Are you okay? Are these comments hurting you?’ The [Quebecois] media wanted me to come out as a victim in the story, but I said no.”
If anything, the event has magnified the strengths of Darlène, a self-proclaimed “postmodern opera” that Lenoir quietly dropped in February. Anglophone listeners slowly tuning in will be hooked by the songwriting strength of the album’s opening three-song suite and “Ton hôtel,” but Francophone listeners will better appreciate the album’s heady narrative and boundary-pushing sexual politics — the result of Lenoir coming into his own sexual identity.
“When I started writing Darlène, I was in a place in my life where I was still hiding parts of my personality. I was feeling bad, and I thought that now was the time to show who I was.”
Lenoir’s La Voix appearance “changed something for me,” he says, but he looks back proudly on his uncompromising, challenging performance — and on his incredible debut record, which was just longlisted for the Polaris Music Prize.
“In Quebec City, it’s more conservative. But just doing your thing, just doing music and believing what you do, having the courage to do the art that you want to and fuck the rest — that was a big thing for me. I wanted to do something that’s going to have not necessarily a commercial impact, but an impact in art and the grander scheme of things, you know?”