A petite Chris (née Christine and the Queens) lounges in New York’s Standard Hotel. Dressed in a white polo shirt with fitted trousers, she wears a gamine look across her chiseled face. The image evokes not another musician but a critic and a poet, Maggie Nelson, who wrote in her book The Argonauts, “In other words she wanted it both ways. There is much to be learned from wanting something both ways…”
Chris flings herself backwards onto the couch at the mention of Nelson. She's aware of her. But she wasn't anticipating the suggestion that this new, masculine iteration of her prior project, Christine and the Queens, is the pop equivalent of a Nelson thesis. “You've made my day, merci,” she says, bashfully, her circular Harry Potter glasses angling toward her chest. “When I think of Maggie Nelson, I think of a high intellectual who's horny as fuck, extremely clever and crude. She doesn't make it simpler. It's so rare that women get to own these facets so intensely and also be in the skin and flesh. You're a slut but you're intelligent.”
Nelson published her gender-bending memoir in 2015, when the terminology around non-binary thinking was just entering the conversation. Unlike other academic prose, Nelson's is accessible. Her account of fluidity is so natural, relatable, and romantic that it can't be unread; it leaves you feeling evolved. The notion of a two-dimensional Adam and Eve world seems limited. Of course we want it both ways. We've always wanted it both ways. Chris is about to release an album (Chris) that presents ideas about ownership, lust, and deconstructing identity in deliciously limpid R&B. It's sexy and smart, camp and earnest, butch and femme. Yet how to explain this…
This morning, Chris is at the end of her “intense” press duties. She's also at the end of her tether. “I'm slightly sick,” she says, refusing defeat. “I feel like I have my finger in the wound. I'm touching a problem.” After the unexpected, globe-conquering Chaleur Humaine (Christine and the Queens' 2014 synth-pop debut), she retreated to France to work on a follow-up. This past May, she emerged with a single, “Girlfriend,” randy with '80s bass-driven Michael Jackson finesse. The song's steez, however, was eclipsed by her transformation. She was now a crop-haired, muscle-flexing, hip-thrusting Lothario. And her name was short, too: Chris.
Onlookers were angry. Quoi?! Some conflated Chris with a desire to transition to male. Apparently, it's more digestible to consider her in either/or terms: man or woman. How about man and woman? Chris was sad and surprised. The haircut, for example—it's just a haircut and it felt amazing. “Short hair, don't care,” she says. It's photographer Paolo Roversi's doing. He shot her for the French magazine Egoïste, and she arrived with a bob style. She'd written an eight-page manifesto on Chris beforehand, and Roversi just looked at her: Where is the short hair? He showed her pictures of Chet Baker. Moments later her hair was like Baker's. “I went, 'Damn, I should've done this before.' I immediately saw myself as a grown-ass, badass woman.”
That's not how others saw her. “How come they think I'm transitioning?” she asks, bemused. After all, she's owning her femininity more as Chris (“You see my breasts and my pointy nipples!”). If she were transitioning, she'd have been less inclined to flaunt her physique. Interviewers have been aggressive in their reactions. Chris describes it charmingly as a “wonderful” cocktail of homophobia and sexism. “It's like a flower bouquet they give me,” she says. In France, her haircut made the news. “I get comments: 'You look like a boy. Grow it back.' When you're a woman working on a masculine energy, either you're transitioning or you're a butch lesbian. Fluidity is impossible.”
When Chris became an international sensation four years ago, she experienced modern-day rock-stardom—onstage every night, meeting desirables, having her way with them. She considered how male rock stars act unapologetically feminine without their masculinity being questioned. “They can be sexual, flawed, and incredibly charismatic. Complexity and intricacy is reserved to men. Women must make it unthreatening, simplified. I wish I could be Nick Cave or Mick Jagger.”
Now she doesn't have to wish, because she's Chris. “Chris is very much me,” she says with a nod. The masculinity has made her feel whole. “My femininity is more comfortable when I go through a macho structure. When you think of extremely macho men, it's so feminine.” She pretends to open her shirt while squeezing her pectorals. “You see them exposed with chest oil and muscles. They're like, 'I'm not gay!' ” She rolls her eyes. “I'm like, 'Dude! You're such a girl.' ”
Héloïse Letissier has been trying to blossom into Chris since her first pangs of sexual awakening. The story of how Christine and the Queens came to be is so fantastical that you couldn't make it up. As the daughter of two academics, she grew up a bookish outsider in Nantes, France. “I was reclusive. I was sure that reality would be disappointing compared to literature. It was the classic 'Nothing's better than the love you read about in books.' I was afraid to travel, afraid to talk to people.” She mocks herself. “I was so cute!”
She describes her relationship with gender and sexuality as a youngster as “monstrous,” attributing the feeling to her queerness and her inability to flaunt herself. “I was a woman, but I had intricate desires,” she says. “I felt like a scam because I didn't fit norms. You internalize that shame.” Eventually Letissier fell in love, but it ended in a breakdown. Escaping France distressed, she wound up in a now defunct club—Madame Jojo's—in London's Soho. For one night, she received solace in the arms of the club's drag performers. She returned to France inspired and produced her own music (she does so to this day). Hence the name: Christine and the Queens.
The construct gave her freedom. “It was the end of shame, the end of shrinking myself, the end of pretending,” she explains. She reveled in this experimentation, and it paid off. Others reveled in it, too. World tours and chart successes took her by surprise, and she began to understand herself as both artist and woman. “I discovered I was stronger than I expected, and I didn't want to try and preserve. I was thinking, 'Can I go further? If so, how?' ” She traveled, she met people. She enjoyed them. “I saw the muscular surface. I experimented with love. I lived real stories of desire. The start of everything is to touch it and be touched.” Chris wasn't shy to do that, either. The social anxiety she had talked up on Chaleur Humaine? Dead.
As life began to imitate art, so too did art imitate life, while Chris began to write about her escapades. “It was a writer's delight, oui,” she says, laughing. There was loneliness in her newfound fame; nobody understood the world she'd created for herself. Sometimes her sexual dalliances would further enhance that feeling of dissociation. “It was melancholic but beautiful. Trying to fall in love made me feel lonely, but I was also relating to people way more.” She describes it as the teenage years she never had. “I accepted my authority. I got to experience otherness. I was intrigued.”
With intrigue came material. It would pour out of her conquests as they lay next to her. “Through the skin, through the intimacy, people give you things, whether [it lasts] three days or a month.” Chris often found herself thinking about a song while in an embrace . “I have a writer's disease. Even if a situation looks like hell, it's a great hell to write about. You dive into the impossible, the conflict, the friction.” Her subjects were complicit in this. “You see it in their eyes when people view you as a writer. They were giving me intense shit on purpose, even if I only met them for a night. I felt like I was a slut-slash-shrink. Sometimes sluts are shrinks.”
As she effuses about all this with every last spark of energy, you can see how agile Chris is in new company. In a cold room, she knows how to be self-effacing—enough so to invite instant empathy. But there’s a debonair positioning, too, meaning she’s always protected by a gentle mystique. It’s an enigma her lovers have attempted to unravel. It’s a game of intrigue she’s very pleased with.
On the eve of the album's release, those former flames are picking apart the new songs, searching for clues. “That satisfies me intensely,” she says with a smile. “I'm the classic male writer. My muses are asking, 'Is it about me?!' And I'm like: 'I don't know, honey, leave me alone for a second.' It was an interesting, sad, and pretty ecstatic time of my life.” If a lover felt particularly close to Chris, they'd employ her birth name: Héloïse. “When people want to show me they're in love, they call me Héloïse: 'I don't love the shebang, I love the person!' ”
Her parents call her Héloïse, too. She thinks of it as poetry. “If I'm honest, it would be freaky if my parents called me Chris, but it's heartbreaking when they call me Héloïse. That's something I didn't choose. It feels like I'm losing my mojo. But if everyone called me Chris, I'd be scared because then I'm lost in my own fiction.” It might not be Chris forever anyway. Thanks to Christine, she became Chris (“It's a gesture of constant emancipation”). But who's next? “Actually, I have an idea!” she says, laughing. “You finish an album, it's like chess. You do a move and then, 'Oh! So now I can do that.’ ”
When Chaleur Humaine came out, the world couldn't fathom Christine either. A self-proclaimed pansexual, she constantly had to educate. She mimics an interviewer pretending to listen. “Then they'd say, So you're gay!” She crosses her legs, smiles, and says, “No, no, no.” She'd already started plotting her sequel by hinting at an album that would explore female desire, specifically sex. A woman's sexual desire is still abstract. “It's a Picasso painting,” she cries.
Chris is built on a meaty, muscular backbone, as hinted at in its singles, “Girlfriend” and “Doesn't Matter.” It's tough and full of stamina, far more focused than Chaleur Humaine. She describes the sound in French as gras. “Dense, organic, like pus or dark blood.” She begins to move like a jungle cat in her chair. “The bassline is animalistic, like the spine of a feline.” Inspired by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, Cameo, Michael Jackson's Bad and Dangerous, it's all about basslines. “If you take away those basslines, everything crumbles,” she says.
Her more brutish exterior has allowed her to delve deeper into open wounds. Standout track "What's Her Face” is about being bullied, and the memories that trigger those times. “Writing is a place of non-negotiation,” she explains. “Christine and Chris are about owning the wounds, showing scars as a way to define yourself. It's not about presenting the best facet but presenting precisely where it hurt.” It continues to hurt. “Yes,” she says. “It never heals. It's confidence to expose what you fight for every day, what you try to overcome. It wakes up, then sleeps again. It's still there. I'm still bleeding.”
Crucially, Chris discovered Janet Jackson's Velvet Rope during the recording process. That classic album presents multifaceted truths about female sensuality, from lust to marital abuse. “You hear the struggles of a woman reaching for her desires,” she says. Madonna's 1991 Truth or Dare documentary held her captive, too. “She was a mutant,” she notes. “Madonna with amazing triceps, onstage air-fucking male dancers with pointy breasts. She was a threat, and she didn't feel sorry about sucking people's energy and demanding that they come to her. It's pure dominant energy.”
Due to the nature of these supposedly “intense” ideas Chris is channeling with the record, she's been advised recently that while promoting she should make sure to smile often. At the moment she’s smiling about this, because we’re both riled. “Really, dude?” she says, fed up. “That makes me ask: Is the conversation really moving forward?” Despite the dominance of women in pop right now, Chris questions whether there's a way to impose balance. “When you try to disrupt, resist, or assert queerness over the male gaze, people freak out.”
Her recent video for “5 Dollars” upset her naysayers again. On Chaleur Humaine, she'd perform in suits, yet was still sexualized by male onlookers. What was she wearing beneath them? In this video, the truth is revealed: S&M bondage. “Yeah,” she says, smirking. “But I'm refusing the breast information and I'm wearing men's underwear. I'm showing, but I'm in charge. It's scary that it's that simple to make people furious. It's surprisingly easy to be rebellious.”
Try and count the ways in which Chris is a unique pop star, and you'll probably miss something. For one, she's a rare international success who insists upon recording her albums in both French and English—an exercise in endurance (“I love working in French. It's kinky. English is bouncier”). She's one of the only performers who conceptualizes choreography while writing music. “I'm not at the level of Michael Jackson,” she says, “but when you think of Michael, there's the song he's singing, and there's the song he's performing. The dancing is the ultimate piece of the puzzle. It's not gratuitous. It's not on top of the song. It makes the song more stellar.”
When she wrote “Doesn't Matter,” she knew it would be a heartbreaking duet, like the Juliette Binoche movie The Lovers on the Bridge. That manifested in dance, not vocal performance. It's intertwined. “The dancing is not to entertain you. It creates the song.” Her new troupe members were cast as if they were appearing in a movie. “I'm not a singer with backup dancers,” she says. “It's way more horizontal. I'm in love with them all, for different reasons.” Is it like Madonna's Truth or Dare? She looks embarrassed. It's far more egalitarian, naturellement. “I'm lost in admiration for them. I'm overcome. When I fall in love in the video, I fall in love. There's something beautiful when the stage bleeds through your life.”
Conversation turns to new admirers, of which Chris has one particularly enthusiastic one. He just won't stop going on about her, but they haven't met yet. It’s Paul McCartney. “I don't know what's happening!” she says, starstruck. “Whenever something like that happens, I always feel like, Me? I'm a lucky motherfucker. Should I do something? Should I tweet? Hey Paul!” Well, what would Chris do? “True! See, I'm not fully Chris all the time. She leaves and I become my teenage self who deals better with rejection than love.”
In 2014, Christine broke through with “Tilted,” a song about being on the outside. With Chris, she's breaching the barriers of the mainstream. Does she feel like she's snuck in the revolution? A pause. “It feels like I'm an outsider inside. I'm undercover.” She grabs her suitcase. A flight home is waiting, but the mission is just beginning.
