In 1986, Prince recorded an album as a woman. Camille, as she and the project were both christened, saw Prince pitching his voice up and assuming a more androgynous appearance to transform into the titular persona. It was condemned by his label, and for all accounts lost to the archives forever. Thirty years later, Héloïse Letissier, the French synthpop artist formerly known as Christine and the Queens, would pay tribute to Prince with a cover of I Feel You. “I remember watching Purple Rain for the first time and being truly amazed by the character,” he told The Line of Best Fit shortly after. “I think Prince as a character was really an important one in pop music because it was a gender-bending, brilliant, funny, almost too gifted to be true character.” It’s a strange bit of coincidence that Camille should re-enter the chat this year, the same year that Letissier should reintroduce himself to the world as Redcar. While Prince’s influence has always been palpable with Letissier, from the genderfucking to the absurd eroticism of his image, this ballsy move reveals him as the true heir apparent to the throne of His Royal Badness. No one else in contemporary pop has the guts to commit to what Letissier is doing, in all its Lacanian strangeness. And with the current state of the world’s politics in all its forms, there’s really no better time for it. Though for Letissier, this shift in nomenclature is far more complex than vaudevillian frivolity. For starters, Letissier began noticing red cars popping up more frequently in his life after the passing of his mother in 2019. A year later, he would come out as a transgender man. There’s something inherently performative about a red sports car. Its iconography has become symbolic of, or rather synonymous with, the masculine ideal. Cars, money, chicks. It’s the status symbol of the 21st century esquire, both a pinnacle of masculine excellence, and the ultimate symbol of masculine aspiration. For Letissier, the red car is as much divine intervention.
The whole rebrand is perhaps more akin to Prince’s switch to The Love Symbol, because for Letissier, Redcar is the assumption of an identity. In this case, the persona is a chameleonic jester that allows Letissier to shift through the different gears of masculine performance in an attempt to reconcile the reality of his gender. “Gender reality is performative,” Judith Butler famously declared, “which means, quite simply, that it is real only to the extent that it is performed.” It’s a theoretical analysis which for the most part sits at the centre of Letissier’s latest album, Redcar les Adorables Étoiles (Redcar the Adorable Stars). It’s unsurprising how, as with Prince’s Camille, this entire thing went over the heads of Letissier’s executives. His label pushed for him to retain what is arguably his deadname for the release and promotion of this album, leading to more confusion over an already perplexing evolution. Redcar’s is a far loftier exploit than Beyoncé declaring she is Sasha Fierce, Nicki Minaj pitch shifting into Roman Polanski, or Letissier’s own adoption of the moniker Chris on his previous album. No, Redcar is performance art: part pop star, part clown, all ugly truth. He has many faces; a pinstriped sailor boy, a rambunctious boozed up libertine, a businessman wearing a single red glove. A dominatrix. Thus far each has been introduced to us by way of the project’s handful of videos, performances, and monologue vignettes posted to Tik-Tok that play out like scenes from a Dadaist cabaret. In fact, the creation and subsequent performance of Redcar has been executed so precisely, that it’s a shame Letissier’s label insisted on muddying the waters. Yet he has persevered, maintaining an aloof sense of mystery with each incarnation of the persona, and more mystery still when it comes to the music itself.
Download and stream Redcar les Adorables Étoiles here
On the surface, Redcar les Adorables Étoiles doesn’t seem all that different from the sort of giddy synthpop Letissier has put out as Christine and the Queens. But on closer inspection, the approach here is more urgent, less effervescent, unhinged even. Tu sais ce qu’il me faut, for instance, works along a violent regular time crash. Letissier’s voice is untouched, raw, and at times grotesque. He layers his own yelps and grunts beneath himself as he sings. It’s a shift from the buttery harmonies of songs like People I’ve Been Sad. The melodies themselves are slipperier, daring to skid off course at any moment, the odd discomfort of la chanson du chevalier being a case in point. In line with this newfound edge, Letissier mostly opts for a palette of neon-soaked synthwave, louche New Wave, and 80’s power ballads, a choice which bends his sound toward something more angular rather than fluid. It makes sense to evoke this era, where pop stars were at their most androgynous and rockstars at their most glam, tying into the gender politics of Redcar as a whole. It’s all gated reverb and laser-like modular synths, an aesthetic that has always bubbled under Christine and the Queens but here, bursts to the surface like a geyser. Redcar les Adorables Étoiles is a definite stylistic departure in this sense, and coupled with Letissier’s often surreal poetry-as-lyrics, makes for what may be his least approachable work to date. Lead single rien dire is the closest of the bunch to hits like Titled, and in the scope of everything else, feels oddly regressive here. Looking For Love, one of the set’s clubbier moments, recalls The Eurythmics with its shuddering analog bassline and reverb laden four on the floor. On Je te vois enfin, he embraces mid-fi Italo citypop to craft pitch perfect, angsty midnight drive listening. The gorgeously sensual Angelus is particularly spellbinding in the way it wraps its poetry around horny Massive Attack style trip-hop. Elsewhere, there’s Pink Floyd pyschrock on Ma bien aimée bye-bye, and Journey stadium rock on Les âmes amantes. The former, an ode to a lost lover, opens the album, hinting that the beloved in question may in fact be Redcar’s former self. “My wife ‘til I die,” he confesses. For all its outward seriousness, Letissier is not afraid of a few send-ups, either. One of the album’s most bizarre moments is the batshit My birdman, a scuzzy acid jazz jam that sees Redcar shift to a breathy falsetto as he serenades his lover, Jamil. He begs him to “cook for me” and feed him like a bird. Then there’s Combien de temps, a meandering eight minute long reggae track whose title translates to “how much time?” in English.
A major question has been how Redcar les Adorables Étoile would factor into the extended method acting routine we are witnessing Letissier perform. It shows no sign of ending anytime soon. This album is merely the ‘prologue’, with further acts to the opera expected next year. This is a good thing; it promises that the project will be given much needed space to grow and settle into itself. The approach to the sound of Redcar happens to be where Letissier and Prince, and hitherto Redcar and Camille, diverge. One is performance in the way of drag, the other is performance as affirmation of reality. While Prince sought to disguise himself not only visually, but sonically, for Redcar this is not a disguise. This is identity. And so Redcar les Adorables Étoiles is honest, unfiltered, and full of juxtapositions, much like the person himself. Redcar is a vehicle for the exploration, and subsequent affirmation, of trans male identity. Through exaggerated clown-like caricatures of masculine stereotypes, Redcar both explodes and affirms Letissier’s own manhood. Gender, after all, only exists so long as it is performed. This makes the absurd Tik-Toks and chaotic performances essential to the whole; it is a potent exodus of Christine of the Queens from the conversation altogether. There’s a messy sort of brilliance to the whole thing, and while the process has been perplexing, let’s not forget that this is a rebirth. Like birth itself, the mythmaking of Redcar is chaotic, painfully confusing, and beautiful. The artist formerly known as Christine and the Queens has been in the process of birth for some time now, and has ultimately delivered one of the year’s most divisive albums and along with it, a pop performance for the ages. It might feel bewildering now, but this is the sort of opus that we will be talking about for years to come.
Listen to My birdman from Redcar les Adorables Étoiles below.
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