The power of exile

French-Canadian divas Alanis Morissette and Celine Dion

by Michael Freedberg

The dressed-up diva music of Alanis Morissette's Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie (Maverick) and Celine Dion's S'il suffisait d'aimer (Sony 550) probes the differences between the true and the temporary, the real and the unreal. In American pop this subject is hardly usual, but in the Europop-influenced music of Québec, whence Dion and Morissette both originate, it is perhaps the most common theme -- probably because to the Québecois, French-speaking Québec seems a nation but isn't yet one.

For the past several years much of the market growth and artistic excitement in pop music has come from outside the English-speaking world, and Québec's music scene is exciting indeed. Drawing its sounds from disco, Europop, power rock, and old-fashioned country string bands -- a combination utterly unlike those that drive recent American hits -- in support of its search-for-knowledge songs, the Québec pop that underlies the music of Morissette and Dion speaks directly to the fastest-growing segment of the record-buying public: those over 30. Yet it also attracts large numbers of the scene's young listeners. Dion and Morissette challenge a similarly broad-band audience with songs that seek self-knowledge as well as knowledge of the real and the unreal, songs that ask romance, commitment, and disillusionment to make a profounder impression than some momentary high or low.

For an American, the most unusual characteristic of these two divas' songs is that they are made not for homegrown fans, who would most easily take to them, but for export audiences: Dion's CD is aimed at a French audience (on the cover her name is spelt "Céline"), Morissette's at the USA. But one can well judge the strength of a society's artistic expression by the number and eloquence of its artistic expatriates, and the textual power and personal resolve evident in Dion's CD and in Morissette's are proof of the immediacy and adaptability of Québec's hit music.

The supremely adaptable Dion narrows her focus for American fans, almost always playing the steadfast loyal lover and singing somewhat in the manner of Barbra Streisand. For her French fans, however, she adds to her repertoire soulful idylls of a kind made famous by variété stars France Gall and Jane Birkin. Dion as loyal lover displays herself on S'il suffisait d'aimer in the soft sad strength of "Je crois toi" and in the defiantly melodic "On ne change pas" (one of those lightly rhythmic orchestral triumphs that Europop thrives on). But the majority of the CD is dedicated to more complex performances. Romantic disaster is Dion's theme in the fast disco song "Dans un autre monde" and in the raspy soul of "Tous les blues sont écrits pour toi." Still, disaster doesn't divert Dion for long. In "Je chanterai," she declares her primary mission -- changing a world of troubles into a multitude of positives -- simply by singing, by moving her soprano from fretful pensiveness to defiant rejoicing. "Terre" takes the same route, from dirty, slide-guitar lowdown to the grandeur of her outcry. Most cathartic of all is "Zora sourit," the CD's first single, in which, so the text tells us, Zora, the song's heroine, uses her best weapon, her smile, to overcome everything that wants to cut her down to size -- smiling even though her heart and her life are brim-full of tears.

Much of credit for the charm and melody of these songs must go to Jean-Jacques Goldman, a star of French variété in his own right, who wrote Dion's first Paris CD, D'eux, and has written all of the music and most of the texts of Si'il suffisait. (The other texts come from Eric Benzi, Anggun's svengali.) Goldman's ear candies bond slickly to Dion's silky soprano; this pair are two of a kind. Which may be one reason that, even though Dion insists on singing proudly in French, she has not released a Québec-style French CD since 1991's Dion chante Plamondon, in which she sang her best stuff -- her most convincing businessman's blues, her most righteous disco song, and Aldo Nova's "Des mots qui sonnet," a power rockout in which Dion confesses her total dependence on the potency of her songwriter's texts. As the guitar screams, Dion keeps on begging, desperately, that he please, please, please give her "some words that will give meaning to her music."

Vulnerability without triumph seems to have passed from Dion's repertoire, along with her disappearance from the Québec music scene. She has been superseded there, chiefly by Marie Carmen -- a contralto who dedicates herself to probing the real and the unreal and who does it with a far more guttural, rhetorical, and egotistical kind of diva power than the purely virtuosic and humble-minded Dion. Carmen's fourth CD, . . . L'autre (Musicor Québec), presents the most Québecois persona there is: herself, singing power rock in French, a larger-than-life diva substantiating her existence and thereby Québec's. In "Le miroir" she looks at her made-up face in the mirror and ponders, in a droll seductive whine, the difference between illusion and reality; in "Apprivoise-moi," a classic piece of power-rock, she declares, full of desire for her lover, that she's "touched the fire." Then comes "Je suis," in which she announces she's "the inexplicable feeling of love" and "the strange blue beauty of the great sky before a storm." The CD appeared just in time for this year's Québec provincial election (on November 30), the ultimate issue of which was nationhood for Québec. Marie Carmen singing her French power-rock bursts as an embodiment of Québec libre? That's an aspiration with which the purely esthetic Dion cannot compete. Which is why Dion's musical exile from Québec will likely continue.

Morissette, because of the snarl and angst of her voice and because of the sexually explicit, therapeutic hurt of her best lyrics, is easy to see as homegrown American: a kick-ass urban folkie like Liz Phair, a shrewder and more songful Sheryl Crow, a big-mama riot grrrl swimming on the darkside. In break-your-leg jams like "Sympathetic Character," rebukes like "Thank U," and soft wondering lullabies like "That I Would Be Good" and "Heart of the House," she fits all these roles, thanks in part to Glen Ballard's post-Dylanesque folkie productions. Ballard's songs abound with sharp acoustic guitar and plain-spoken melodies. Yet even in face-to-face romantic combats there is nothing plain about Morissette's singing. Embellished to the max, in diva dramas like "The Couch" and "Can't Not," in the ultradiva rock-opera rhetoric of "I Was Hoping" or the guitar growl of "Joining You," as well as in the enigmatic rhythms of "Front Row," Morissette's soprano displays itself full of gurgles and curls, trills, long beautiful soaring, and glossy with echo effect -- the voice of a damnably glamorous, goddess-big ego.

Morissette loves nobly. And she abases herself nobly too. Nothing in American hits prepares a listener for "The Couch," a song in which a man's widow tells her daughter how her father "died in the arms of his lover, how dare he," but in French variété there are plenty of such songs -- for example, the four studio CDs of Mylène Farmer, France's biggest pop star since she debuted in 1986 with Cendres de lune, abound in them. Farmer's work is melancholy and ecstatic, often backed by guitar rock so torrid it makes Courtney Love's work sound wimpy. She also sings dreamsongs more woozy than the Cocteau Twins' as well as racy fast Eurodisco. Morissette lacks Farmer's multiple voices, but she has mastered Farmer's melancholically ecstatic side -- for example, "One" and "Would Not Come," the first an expansively wistful Eurodiva aria full of dignified oratory, the other a darkside dream, both sung almost exactly in Farmer style (and supported by disjointed dream music lifted almost directly from Farmer's rock-gothic work). "I Was Hoping" and "The Couch" are fierce and hot: Morissette smolders. A woman of high dignity screaming undignified vengeance, borne up by minor chords, orchestral echo, and exotic percussion, she sings regally, declaiming, "I don't know where to begin in all of my 50 years, I have been silently suffering and adapting, perpetuating and enduring, who are you younger generation to tell me that I have unresolved problems" in a voice as cruelly inflamed as the friction of her meter.

Obsessed with gesture and riveted to its rhetorical devices, the world of Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie dispenses with the X-rated ironies that allowed so much of Jagged Little Pill to disgorge its ferocious hurts rather than sustain them. Infatuation Junkie's diva sustains her hurts, dancing a mad frenzy in which all her infatuations get exorcised by a ton of beauty and a fistful of slash. Infatuation Junkie does not surprise the way Jagged Little Pill did, but its music is grander and more explosive. On Jagged Little Pill Morissette performed almost as faithfully to exile standards as Celine Dion does in her own, differently modeled English-language work. Infatuation Junkie, though sung exclusively in English, is, like Dion's S'il suffisait d'aimer, an album of music that's French in structure, tone, and characterization. And if, like Dion's Paris CDs, it tells us very little about Morissette's Canadianism, that in no way slights its melodic evil or its thrashful charm. If Morissette continues to expound, probe, and declaim with this level of rhythmic punch and soprano command, she may impose her theatrical, non-grunge vision of things on her Anglo audience in spite of its prejudices. If she ever manages, like Mylène Farmer, to sing at the point where voice and music, and therefore illusion and reality, interact -- and thereby make the act of creating a song out of nothing the underlying subject (and paradox) of all her songs, as Farmer does -- she might well induce her fans to think as deeply about what she is doing as they do about what she is saying. And we might like it. At which point the exiled ones will be us, not her.