“What if the obvious is suddenly so insane?”
This lyric from Christine and the Queens’ ‘Feel So Good’ is what it’s like to meet the French force that is Héloïse Letissier. Sitting at a cafe in Redfern, Sydney, she is beautifully open.
It’s a hot autumn day (“climate change?” she suggests), in the midst of a full day of press after wrapping up the Australian leg of her global tour; and yet… here she sits, willing to talk you through her art with the kind of welcoming disposition which given her experiences, she could easily not embody.
Chris is the kind of person who gets bullied in high school and launches an anti-bullying campaign (she actually did this). She’s the kind of person who gets kicked out of theatre school, has her heart broken, and invents a persona so she can make the art she always dreamed of (she of course, did this too).
Chris has a Diamond-certified debut album in Chaleur Humaine under her belt; two NME Awards; while her single ‘Girlfriend’ took out Song of the Year in Time Magazine. She’s performed live on Later with Jools Holland, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and the Graham Norton Show, and has stolen the show at festival juggernauts Glastonbury and Coachella.
Chris has been berated by media both in her native France and internationally (one journalist asked if she thinks people want to know about her sex life). Her appearance has been picked apart; discussed as you would an art exhibit on a conveyer belt – entirely objective and exploitative.
She was physically edited by Elle magazine, whose 2015 cover image left her hardly recognisable. And yet… she has the ability to suggest an entire psychology or societal reflection in one song.
Stream Chaleur Humaine below:
“The core of it sometimes is, ‘How can I try to relate and how can I exist the way I want to. And desire the way I want to. And is it going to be possible?’ “Sometimes it is,” she smiles. “In fleeting moments, and with some people.
“I remember writing about Christine and becoming Christine because I wanted to end this state of shame and of disappearance of myself. It’s always infusing the work because it’s still going.
“I think I’m exploring things further on the second record; about my desire and my lust, my will to exist as [I am]. And I’m still facing resistance to that. So there are still things that need to be pushed further.”
Before the media-defined ‘career moment’ when Chris cut her hair in 2017, she struggled to portray the character of Christine – this intertwinement of male and female. She used silhouettes and masculine choreography in her videos and shows; she wore buttoned-up suits.
“[It was] to cancel the information of femininity, which was a way to try and deal with the male gaze; but it was a failure,” she admits.
“I was naïve, I was like, ‘If I do that I’m going to escape the male gaze because I’m refusing my body, right?’ Then the comments on ‘Saint Claude’, the first video, are like, ‘Is she fuckable or not?’.
“So, I was like, ‘Oh you can’t escape that shit’.”
The second LP, Chris, is much more assured. Her music dismantles this expectation with subversive messaging across all that she does. Through music videos like ‘Tilted’ and ‘5 Dollars’, she chooses her physicality carefully to subvert the ideas of how she should be perceived as a woman.
Stream Chris below:
In ‘5 Dollars’, the video sees her expose her skin without an inch of ‘come hither’ sexuality, instead, her muscles are flexed. She’s in charge, she’s flipping the gender stereotype, and she leaves the viewer questioning gender roles, and more importantly, what it is to own your sexuality.
“I don’t think the race is over, baby,” she sings.
Watch the video for ‘5 Dollars’:
“With embracing all the desires comes vulnerability and I think being vulnerable is still something people are afraid of. You know, understandably,” she says, her voice euphonious.
“But in my experiences with love and different partners, I always notice that it’s immensely erotic to just allow yourself to explore. It creates a really strong bond and you kind of,” she pauses, “let go of stereotypes that can cluster.”
There’s a moment in Chris’ live show where she’s alone facing away from the audience. She’s removed her blouse at this point and a single spotlight picks up all the dips and definition of her muscles as she rolls her body and accentuates each groove. This wasn’t always going to form part of the show, but a broken heart brought it to life one day.
“Someone broke my heart actually just before a rehearsal,” she offers. “I hung up and I was like, ‘Oh my god’. I couldn’t believe it was happening.
“I went to the stage and I wanted to find a way to express sadness, and it was just a pure emulation of sadness. It didn’t matter if I was a boy or a girl and it’s always like that for me when I’m on stage. Whether I’m Chris or Christine it doesn’t really matter. I have a female body and I’m glad to be in it but it’s not really shaping anything else.”
Chris is consistently reminded of the constraints of her gender. She had to edit a video clip which showed her nipple in a two-second frame. On Instagram men leave comments like: ‘Smile’, ‘Why don’t you smile?’, and ‘You look angry’.
“I’m like, ‘I’m not designed to serve your pleasure all the time’. It’s that small detail that is amplified, and it’s constant in a woman’s life.”
Globally, feminism’s level of cultural relevance has hit a new peak. Since the early discourse of classifying women as actual human beings in the late 1800s, to third wave feminism in the ‘90s (which saw the emergence of riot grrrl groups in music), to now, where feminism means different things to different people – and Time’s Up for some of the world’s most powerful men – there is a state of confusion surrounding feminism.
Post-#metoo, women fill more boardrooms and public offices. The discourse is undeniably rampant; but it’s confusing for society as a whole. Women are asked what feminism is to them, while the same women are asking themselves how much of their own identity was created by men. At the same time, men are asking how much of their own identity was created by men who might now be seen as their detractors.
For Chris, she’s in a constant flux of outward speculation. She now prefers to be called Chris over Christine; it’s just a nickname to her but to others it’s associated with masculinity. When she cut her hair it was her playful way of curating her own existence, for others, it marked something bigger.
“People were like, ‘Are you transitioning?’,” she’s surprisingly twinkle-eyed here, ready to laugh it off. “It was so extreme. I was like. ‘I’m just a woman with short hair, what’s wrong with you?’”
Chris is an enigma. The industry is unable to define and brand her. But it could be said that her self-imposed nuances have become so much a focus that it has steered away from the music, the intense work that weaves through every single note.
“In France I spent hours talking about the haircut. People also made it psychological, like ‘She’s shedding away her femininity’. Oh my fucking god I actually feel more feminine now.”
But then again, the conversations around gender fluidity, femininity, feminism and ownership of sexuality and power, are precisely the conversations she hopes to evoke with her music.
Unfortunately, jabs in comment sections and in the media are what happens when an artist outgrows their own niche. No longer are they protected by the warm womb of their community. They are out in the open, under a microscope and subject to the kinds of criticism usually reserved for politicians.
No longer can her songs like ‘iT’ – where she essentially sings the lyrics “I’m a man now” for four minutes – be instantly understood by her peers. Instead she is subjected to ingrained patriarchal ways of thinking but on a much larger scale than any other person without her public profile.
Watch Chris perform ‘iT’ live at Glastonbury (2016):
Somehow, Chris is anaesthetised against much of this criticism. She is, of course, working on new music. She’s been writing since January, is even collaborating with Charli XCX, and she’s rethinking the LP as a whole.
“I’m thinking of releasing songs out of an album format; maybe a bit scattered, just as a small addendum to Chris.”
It’s fascinating really, against the narrow minds of those who need to box her in to understand her – and against her own anxiety which lead her to the stage as Christine and the Queens in the first place – Chris lovingly offers the space for us to question our own ethos. Because what if the obvious, whether it be gender definition, power, or even success, is suddenly so insane?
“It feels like defining is another way to cancel the beauty of it,” she smiles again, pointedly.
