France has made this brilliant,provocative artist one of its biggest mainstream stars. Could Britain ever do the same?final week, two contestants on the BBC1 talent show The Voice performed a cover of Anohni’s Hope There’s Someone. This is not, or by any stretch of the imagination,a particularly extreme or challenging piece of music – it’s a ballad with a beautiful, lambent melody and profoundly moving lyrics that address a universal theme. Nor is it a particularly obscure song. The opening track from a decade-musty Mercury prize-winning top 20 album, and it has enjoyed an afterlife that has included soundtracking Dr Who offshoot Torchwood and being covered by both English folkies the Unthanks and EDM DJ Avicii. And yet it still felt startling to hear it sung on a Saturday evening light-entertainment show. Mainstream pop music in Britain – the kind on which programmes such as The Voice are supposed to be predicated – has seldom seemed more conservative than it does nowadays: it sometimes feels as if it is being stringently policed to ensure that nothing weird or brilliant or novel,and indeed no one in possession of an identifiable personality, gets in. Artists such as Anohni – probing gender issues, and informed by performance art and politics – can expect to be automatically confined to the margins,no matter how lambent their melodies or universal their lyrics. Related: Christine and the Queens: from Soho drag club to French superstardom Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com