Gender Is a Construct. Christine and the Queens Built a Bulldozer.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/12/arts/music/christine-and-the-queens-chris-interview.html

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In the spring of 2017, the French pop singer, songwriter, producer and choreographer Hélöise Letissier felt ready to reintroduce herself.

It had been three years since the French release of her debut album, “Chaleur Humaine” (“Human Warmth”), announced the persona Christine and the Queens, an androgynous, hip-hop-enamored outsider with flickers of Michael Jackson and David Bowie. After the record sold over 850,000 units in France alone, its mostly English-language reissue, which arrived in 2015, propelled Ms. Letissier into even more rarefied terrain for an international artist: the American pop music buzz machine. Ms. Letissier was summoned for an onstage anointing by Madonna, performed on “The Daily Show With Trevor Noah” and even figured into the plot of the FX comedy “Better Things,” which featured an extensive dance sequence to her song “Tilted.”

During that time, the artist, who grew up as the daughter of two professors in Nantes, a midsize Northwestern city, was evolving. Nonstop touring had physically changed her — her body was more muscular, toned, athletic. And she felt more powerful in other ways, too. For the first time, she had real money — some of which she spent on a secluded house in Paris that made her parents’ eyes widen — and near-total creative and professional autonomy.

The last time Ms. Letissier’s life had taken such a dramatic turn, after a traumatic breakup and sudden expulsion from her college drama program (for insubordination), she created Christine, a suit of armor for conquering self-doubt. Now it was due for an upgrade. She wondered how she should wield her new powers. As a queer woman, could she lean into them wholeheartedly? Or would that make people uncomfortable? If she were a man, would there be any question?

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She started writing a new album — a new chapter in the life of Christine — about a woman she described as “horny, hungry and ambitious,” with a masculine mien, now going by the name Chris. The album, also called “Chris,” is to be released on Sept. 21.

“When I compared my situation with some male rock stars, I was really interested in how different the feeling was,” Ms. Letissier, 30, said in an interview in English this summer in a Lower East Side hotel, while she was visiting for an industry showcase and to perform the new album’s lead single, “Girlfriend,” on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.” “For men, with success comes power, admiration and respect. But when you’re a woman and you succeed, people either question your authorship immediately, or you get accused of being bossy, bitchy or capricious.”

In April of last year, she sat for her first photo session as Chris, for a spread in the cult French magazine Egoïste. By that time, Ms. Letissier had fully conceived the new persona and written an essay about it. After makeup and wardrobe — she wore a crisp white oxford shirt and loosefitting black trousers — she felt transformed. So she was surprised when the photographer, the high-fashion maven Paolo Roversi, objected.

“He was like: ‘Why don’t you want to be totally Chris? I don’t get it,”’ she recalled. Ms. Letissier looked like Chris from the neck down, he said, but her hair, then an undulating bob, was still Christine.

Mr. Roversi suggested that she cut it. Ms. Letissier, ambushed in the moment by latent insecurity, resisted. “My jaw is a bit square,” she murmured.

“Your jaw is square, that’s why it’s cool!” she recalled Mr. Roversi replying, undeterred, with infectious conviction. “Cut your hair and allow yourself to be exactly who you want to be!”

And so she did.

On her way to the train after the shoot, with short, slick hair that made her look like a boyish Chet Baker, she basked in her reflection in store windows. Passers-by turned their heads. “It was like Christmas,” she said. “I felt like, ‘This is how I want to exist.’”

FINDING NEW WAYS of existing is a specialty of Ms. Letissier’s. Over three interviews this summer, she seemed consistently at ease — hyper-articulate, with a born performer’s inclination to augment her speech with silly voices, or by breaking into song. But she spent most of her youth uncomfortable in her own skin. She found refuge in theater, but her body often felt like an ill-fitting costume. “I always wanted to be Romeo, not Juliet,” she said. “Romeo is a much cooler way to be — Juliet’s just up in a balcony, waiting.”

Uncertain of how to perform femininity in high school, she went through a phase in which she wore heavy makeup and frilly skirts, earning her the nickname Marie Antoinette. One of the first songs she ever wrote, “iT,” a spiritual prelude to “Chris” from “Chaleur Humaine,” is a Freudian fantasy about acquiring a penis and its privileges.

On the new album, Ms. Letissier, who described herself as gender-queer and pansexual, doesn’t seek to abandon her womanhood so much as expand its turf. In evolving the character of Chris, she looked to famous women who had drunk from the cup of male privilege before her, including Madonna, Janet Jackson and Sigourney Weaver, as well as one pretty boy: Leonardo DiCaprio, circa 1996 — Romeo himself.

“Every masculine hero narrative I could find I wanted to steal for myself and twist to my size,” she said.

Though innuendo and omission have long been tools of convenience for gay and lesbian pop stars worried about alienating straight audiences, that calculus is changing with a new, more socially progressive generation. Hayley Kiyoko’s “Curious,” about competing with a man for another woman’s affections, was an insurgent hit on Top 40 radio this year. And Ms. Letissier, along with indie contemporaries like Fever Ray and Sophie, is one of a handful of pop agitators using an explicitly queer perspective to grapple with gender norms in their music.

“Chris is approaching these themes with nuance and as a means to tell a human story,” said Arjun Pulijal, vice president for marketing for the Capitol Music Group, which signed Ms. Letissier after the success of “Chaleur Humaine.” The label group, also home to Katy Perry and Halsey, is hoping that story will resonate. “We ultimately believe there is a broad audience to reach,” Mr. Pulijal said.

IN A COLLISION of life and art, Ms. Letissier went through a phase of dating those she described as “macho men” while writing “Chris,” spurred by both animal attraction and heedless curiosity.

The experiment partly validated her pessimism about the chasm between the sexes: Men with whom she initially shared chemistry often lashed out when she exhibited dominance — while chatting in a group at a party, for example, or when picking up the check at a restaurant.

“They felt so easily emasculated by everything,” she said, reflexively clenching both fists in exasperation, as if reliving a quarrel. She was dressed with muted whimsy, in a denim jacket with a fringe collar, black culottes and white Nike Air Max sneakers, like a poet at her day job. “‘You’re too loud! You’re too funny! Something about you is too much!’”

But the experience also confirmed another hunch: In private moments, many of her alpha suitors confessed their own feelings of being trapped by their gender.

“They were telling me stories about being a young man and having to fight back or get labeled a faggot or weak,” she said. “I think they were searching for something in me that they couldn’t find elsewhere. But at the same time, I was too complicated. I actually felt empathy for them. You can’t even embrace your desires, can you? You’re still obsessed with being the strongest dude in the room!’”

Her misadventures in heterosexual pair bonding formed the seed of “Girlfriend.” The song’s groove-laden, electro-funk production is pure ’80s. But its lyrics, about craving an intimacy free from the gravitational pull of traditional gender roles, are unmistakably modern. She sings:

GirlfriendDon’t feel like your girlfriendBut loverDamn, I’d be your lover.

Ms. Letissier, an avid student of pop music history, wrote and produced the album herself, drawing inspiration from the work of the ’80s R&B/funk band Cameo and Michael Jackson’s 1991 album, “Dangerous.” Where “Chaleur Humaine” was defined by soft textures and blue moods, “Chris” is hard-nosed and irrepressible, a coiled spring unbound.

“The first album was about a young, queer girl who was a bit melancholic, but now I’m flexing my muscles,” she said. “I wanted to experiment with a tougher, more aggressive sound.”

She created it with the help of old instruments, including an E-MU Mo’ Phatt synthesizer that came preloaded with campy hip-hop and new-jack-swing samples. For all of the album’s heady themes, it derives its power equally from the hips, deepening the connection to dance that animates her live shows and was captured in the indelible videos for “Tilted” and “Saint Claude.” “The core of all the music I love is a good bass line and a good rhythm,” Ms. Letissier said.

Having previously contended with collaborators who sought to undermine or overrule her, a common complaint among women in the male-dominated music industry, Ms. Letissier restricted creative sessions for the album to a small circle of trusted confederates.

“She wasn’t the kind of artist who wanted anyone to do the thing for her,” the neo-funk musician Dâm-Funk, who is featured on “Girlfriend” and recorded with Ms. Letissier on two occasions in Los Angeles, said in a phone interview. “She came in with a plan — ‘What if we tried this chord here? Or this cadence there?’ I usually produce the records that I’m on, but I respected that she knew what she wanted and wasn’t going to let anyone run her over.”

A FEW HOURS BEFORE her showcase in New York, under the spotlight in a darkened theater on the Lower East Side, Ms. Letissier was lithe but purposeful as she ran through the choreography for a cover of Travis Scott’s woozy trap ballad “Goosebumps,” featuring Kendrick Lamar. As she capably chewed into a section of Mr. Lamar’s verse, in which he serenades a select region of a woman’s anatomy, her four backup dancers kept limber by doing push-ups and stretches in front of the stage.

Choreography has always been a lodestar for Ms. Letissier, who is quick to use her body as one more weapon in her storytelling arsenal. It was her rigorous commitment to the physical requirements of the “Chaleur Humaine” shows that precipitated the changes to her physique that first inspired “Chris.”

“Dancing for me is like a second language,” she said over breakfast the morning after the performance. “It’s the best way for me to get out of my shell and be expressive in a very personal way.”

For Ms. Letissier, trading her bodily shell, that ill-fitting costume of her youth, for the new shell of Christine was never merely a prerequisite for pop stardom; it was an emotional survival tactic, a system for aligning her inner and outer selves. What surprised her about becoming “Chris” was that it often felt as if there were no shell at all.

“There is a feeling of incarnation that is a huge shift in my life,” she said. “I used to want to escape other people, because I was afraid of being seen as a monster. Now I’m like, ‘Let them come closer and see.’”