[Deepwaters]

Alizée, metamorphosed
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In 2000, a 15-year-old girl conquered the hit parades. Her freshness could decline, she endures. Today a wife and mother, the ex-Lolita returns with a fourth album, Une enfant du siècle, composed by the cream of the Parisian underground. Meet her.
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This winter afternoon in a chic, deserted Parisian café, one finds amusing women’s appearances. Or rather, strangely, adolescent traits on women’s faces. The fault of lips too red, hair too carefully dressed, conversation cool, adult. To say that one believes that so many people are in such a hurry to be – cool, adult. Save Alizée, whom we have known almost ten years since her appearance as “Lolita” at age 16, sold to us by Mylène Farmer.

This was before Britney Spears, Lorie, Miley Cyrus and a whole continent of bimbos who have wised up the world concerning the supposed innocence of young girls. Those who still believe in that and haven’t read Nabokov, have trouble with Alizée, who, strangely, has not followed the same path. She had a tasteful air (and wise, too). Her jiggles in socks and barrettes, if they displayed her thighs, offered neither deep décolletage nor teasing moues.

After three records of diminishing success (since her liberation from the disillusioned redhead), a marriage (Jérémy Chatelain, ex-Star Ac’ of the mincing pretty-boy style of the ‘00s) and a daughter (Annily, going on 5 years old), Alizée, good mother and good child of parents still living in Ajaccio, where she grew up, returns with a fourth album haunted by Edie Sedgwick. That is, that tornado of the anxious ‘60s, the flamboyant heiress who dragged her ennui, her beauty and her fantasies of the muse through the streets of New York and in the shade (too big for her) of Andy Warhol. She died young of excess and wild nights.

Alizée, as one supposes, and as she confirms, is the opposite of Edie. Never in danger of intoxication with controlled substances, and rarely with alcohol. “I have chosen other things, family, work.” And she also finds herself, at the same time, at the opposite end from the artist she was 10 years ago. Square, honest, not so laid-back, easily confessing her lack of education or at least her limited, “mainsream” culture. In brief: she does not pretend to be someone else than Alizée, 25 years old, a popular singer. It’s unusual to cultivate her patch of garden; those who receive the love of the public cannot hope for that of the critics, or vice-versa, you can't have your cake and eat it too.


Is that all, Alizée? Almost. We shall see.

It all starts with her next-to-last album, Psychédélices, on which she collaborated with Oxmo Puccino, Bertrand Buggalat, Daniel Darc and Jean Fauque. The lyricist for Bashung, Fauque wrote a song, Fifty-Sixty, inspired by Sedgwick and by his own sister, Maripol (the New York muse and creatrice who worked with Madonna and Basquiat, and who encountered Alizée in the past, in the time of Mylène Farmer – it’s a small world). She liked this song so much, Alizée, that she arranged (and made into a single) a remix intended for clubs, and gave the job through intermediaries to David Rubato. Who, in unconscious vision, slowed down and chopped up the song instead of shaking it up, and it exploded. So it emerged: a gliding object, elegiac, spectacular enough, accompanied by a quasi-gothic, spooky video. Alizée adored it.

CATCHY MELODIES, HEAVY DRUMS
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From this, it all began. It made the rounds of the underground Parisian circle, via Rubato and the Institubes label, via Jean-René Etienne, finally by assembling a dozen musicians, producers or cinematists at the frontier of hip-hop, electro and pop. They all came together around Alizée and took possession, for her, of the New York myth of Edie S. Who was made more the dream of nostalgic young people who had not been born in her lifetime.

And that clique, through the challenge to wrap up, to shut the door on, the young/already old Alizée, an album to return in grace, and (at times) to captivate and depress alike the general public, the sly and the oafish. In the space that the cunning album was able to deliver, full of the future and of urgency, behold Un enfant du siècle. A trick the likes of which no one has dared since Lio, Jackie Quartz, Jeanne Mas. One rarely hears something like this. Of the true variety, of the French song, when one is more accustomed to seeing its place (of popularity) taken by hip-hop, electro, dance.

But anyway.