Chris crosses over
I’m so in love with the amount of Eighties inspo hitting the music scene and beyond right now. Listening to Christine and the Queens’ triumphantly queer second album, Chris, feels like a dip into a nineteen- gayty rom- com. Chris’ big- perm hair and shoulderpad sass will make you orgasm, When Harry Met Sally- style. Let’s start with “gender” — an odd place to start when reviewing an album, but let’s go with it. The World Health Organisation defi nes gender as “a socially constructed characteristic of women and men,” which means that it’s all bullshit. It’s made up. It’s a construct that separates men from women, masculine from feminine and probably even tops from bottoms… but Chris — real name Héloïse Letissier, then Christine ( and the Queens), now just Chris, because she’s channelling masculinity, and why the hell not? — is breaking down gender identity as never before.
Damn ( What Must A Woman Do) lays down an ethereal electronic- funk exploration of pansexuality (“a butch babe in LA… let me spit on this young man fresh asleep”), while on the vulnerable What’s- Her- Face, Chris refl ects on how years of playground bullying have aff ected her confidence. There are moments of queer defi ance too, spelt out in album opener Comme si: “There’s a pride in my singing… I am done with belonging.” Meanwhile, 5 dollars radiates Chris’s strength as an artist and the current state of the LGBT+ movement: “Some of us just had to fi ght / for even being looked at right.”
This is an album for those of us who have been too scared to be ourselves, and who, like Chris, don’t need to pretend any more.
New Christine and the Queens’ album is a queer- empowering delight