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There is no question that Céline Dion is having a moment. The Québécoise songbird is posing for Vogue in the latest couture creations, owning the front row at the Paris shows, stealing the show at the Met Ball, and being fawned over by no less than Drake, (who informed her backstage at the Billboard Awards that he’d like to get a tattoo of her face). Millennials have resuscitated her oeuvre, insisting on the appeal of the hit tunes of their youth; you can now walk into hip bars and coffee shops in Williamsburg and hear “My Heart Will Go On” playing non-ironically. You might even notice a tattooed waitress crooning along. And so, I’ve been puzzling over this question: After a 35-year career and some 250 million albums sold, has Céline Dion become cool?
Dion’s bonafides as the ne plus ultra artist of uncool were laid down in 2007 by Carl Wilson, in his seminal book Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste. Wilson’s project was to interrogate his own fierce dislike of Dion’s music, and figure out why he—a white, straight, male, middle-class, cisgender rock critic with eclectic tastes—was so acutely allergic to Dion’s syrupy sound. What pleasure, he asked himself, did Dion’s millions upon millions of worldwide fans discover in her music? And could he, by stripping himself of his assumptions about Dion, locate that pleasure himself? Let’s Talk About Love is an essential book, heady in its point-by-point dismantling of the social constructions around personal taste, and full of heart in the way that Wilson engages with a phenomenon he can’t understand. Reading it, I found myself, in turn, questioning the basis of my own musical taste—wondering to what degree it was class-driven, for instance, and empathizing with the Dion devotees who softened the edges of their workaday lives by listening to “Because You Loved Me.”
Watch Céline Dion Take Paris in the Best Couture Looks of the Season:
In Let’s Talk About Love, Wilson sets Dion against one of his heroes, Elliott Smith, seeing in the barbed vulnerability of Smith’s handmade tunes the wabi-sabi of authenticity. A decade on from the book’s publication, I think it’s fair to note that the worm has turned where authenticity is concerned. And, pace Wilson, it’s worth breaking down what we mean when we describe an artwork as authentic, because Dion’s resurgent popularity may be due, in part, to generational suspicion of the term.
As an artistic value, authenticity has long been premised on the notion of a sphere of privacy. We modern Romantics suppose the existence of an artist trapped in his or her own tortured interiority, which forces itself out into the open, anxiously and obliquely, only because it must, because the alternative, to coin a phrase of Elliott Smith’s, is to “bottle up and explode.” Personally, I’ve had it with that stance. You only have to read a few Dick Lit novels, as I like to call them, about neurotic protagonists wrestling with the small difficulties of being white, male, and pedigreed in the modern urban world, to comprehend that art that foregrounds its own authenticity can be as callow and predictable as any crafted-to-be-commercial work. Ditto the Sundance indies, with their cutely dysfunctional families, and the blur of unstartling canvases at Frieze. Authenticity in art now seems to denote a style, in whatever genre, that gestures at complication in an attempt to disguise the fact that the work was created with one eye on the marketplace. In that light, you could argue no music is more authentic—in the dictionary sense of the word—than that of Céline Dion, whose pursuit of mainstream success (and enjoyment of the trappings of that success) is utterly guileless. She gives the people what they want, which is, apparently, earworm melodics, bathos, soothing orchestral accompaniment, and Hollywood tie-ins, and she gets to have a very glamorous life befitting of an iconic pop diva.
Céline Dion makes absolute sense in the era of the personal brand. Thanks to social media and reality TV, we’ve come to redefine the authentic in terms not of a hidden self, but of a self that’s super-exposed and cannily commodified. To wit, the 2016 election. Over and over again, the public was told that, in private, Hillary Clinton was warm, was goofy, was deep in ways that didn’t translate on TV. What the public heard was that Hillary Clinton wasn’t who she appeared to be—and depending on their individual predilections, people could inscribe any meaning they liked to that. Progressives might inscribe that she was one of them, secretly longing for single-payer health insurance and the breakup of the big banks. Alt-rightists decided she was ill, was a serial murderer, was a major player in a pedophilia ring run out of the basement of a D.C. pizza place that doesn’t even have a basement. Clinton’s desire for privacy—for interiority—was problematic for a lot of people, and it found its perfect metonym in her personal email server, which is why the issue resonated to the degree that it did. Whereas Donald Trump, say what you will about him, neither promised nor threatened any hidden depths. He is exactly who he seems to be: DJT-signature crassness and plutocratic self-seeking all the way down.
Before you get your knickers in a twist: I am certainly not suggesting that the reemergence of Céline Dion as a cultural force is as vexing or potentially toxic a phenomenon as the political rise of Donald Trump. In fact, I see good things in it: among them savvy, artistry, and a demonstration of the cultural currency now wielded by those who have long adored her music without irony, without asterisks. Her great gift—aside from those god-given pipes—has been her ability to tap into trends and supersize them. She’s a pleaser, an entertainer, the ultra diva when being a belting diva was the thing—à la forebear Whitney Houston—and now she’s occupying the playful performative mode of Rihanna and Beyoncé. And Céline herself is up to something intriguing in the way she’s staging this comeback, between her European tour and ongoing Las Vegas residency, working with stylist Law Roach to make fashion statements as sweeping as her choruses, and now and then even poking fun at her own notoriety, as when she stepped out in Vetements’s oversize Titanic sweatshirt. She seems looser now, in a way she didn’t 20 years ago, when Titanic was released.
But it would be a mistake, I think, to interpret Céline’s current looseness as following on either a career in which she’s ticked off every item on the pop star to-do list, and thus has nothing left to prove, or the death of her husband, René Angélil, often credited as the Svengali behind her success. It’s tempting to see Dion as a woman suddenly freed to “be herself.” But to do so is to miss the point, and why she is the perfect figure for this moment, the latest peak in her illustrious career: Céline has always been herself.
Behind the Scenes of Céline Dion’s Couture Week Adventure in Paris:
