Powered by Google
Home
Listings
Editors' Picks
News
Music
Movies
Food
Life
Arts + Books
Rec Room
Moonsigns
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Personals
Adult Personals
Classifieds
Adult Classifieds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
stuff@night
FNX Radio
Band Guide
MassWeb Printing
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About Us
Contact Us
Advertise With Us
Work For Us
Newsletter
RSS Feeds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Webmaster
Archives



sponsored links
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
PassionShop.com
Sex Toys - Adult  DVDs - Sexy  Lingerie


   
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend

Peek-a-boo
The many faces of Miss Kittin
BY MICHAEL FREEDBERG

Based in Geneva, the songwriter, DJ, and chanteuse who calls herself Miss Kittin — real name Caroline Herve — has swiftly moved from momentary novelty to sustained brilliance. The genius of modern French variété has been to work from behind a mask in order to probe one’s inner self without loss of privacy. Miss Kittin wears her own brand of mask, and she probes her inner self with a voice not to be conflated with that of any other singer; yet to the variété tradition she belongs.

Her latest CD, I Com (AstralWerks), combines poignant social observation, delicacy, and thoughtful self-examination with several genres of pop music that don’t often appear together. For the music, credit her skills as a club DJ, her readiness to borrow from so many sources, and her exposure, while growing up in the Savoie region of France, to variété, the pop world’s most open-ended idiom. Where else could you find an album with riot grrrl ("Meet Sue Be She"), thug soul ("Requiem for a Hit"), flirtatious repartee ("Kiss Factory"), paradoxical self-portraiture ("Allergic"), space-disco Europop ("I Come.com"), German industrial ("Neukölln 2"), and a (marvelously lovable) cover version of Indochine’s "3ème Sexe"? As for Kittin’s voice, it has an air of whispery, indomitable delicacy, and — surprise! — her English sounds Japanese, like the herky-jerky, kewpie-doll voices of Shonen Knife.

Singing Japanese-accented English to Francophone and German-speaking fans, Kittin sounds doubly distanced. She presents herself in domino, leaving you to guess who she really is; but, always flirtatious (some would say peek-a-boo), she keeps flashing you clues, here and there, to what she thinks and sees. In "Professional Distortion," she talks about her life as a stage star: "I have to be nice all the time/I have say hello baby . . . I have to make a dress-up show up/I have to put guests on the list/I have to pretend to pretend/I have to never trust you guys."

And so it goes in her life behind the mask. We do not get to find out who the real Miss Kittin is, not here, not anywhere on the CD — as she declares at the beginning of "Professional Distortion," "Okay, I’m under cover, and my name won’t appear anywhere." But who would exchange the illuminating wit, the clever satire, the unsettling annoyances that she talks of for the mere facts of a tell-all? Even those songs that purport to tell us about Miss Kittin, "Allergic," "Dub About Me," and "Clone Me," give us her observations only.

Still, who cannot empathize with Kittin’s bewilderment at having to present herself as a star on stage at the same time that she continues to be Caroline Herve? Where she hails from, who her parents are, whether she was abused as a child or suffers from drug addiction, illicit pregnancy, or tax liens, of these we are not told, being instead confronted by the drama of her oddness. And we feel no need to ask. Neither do we hear much about relationships, even if, in "Requiem for a Hit" and "Kiss Factory," she toys with the sexually explicit. Here too there is distance, though; far more sexual is "I Come.com," in which her horniness, her sense of romance, and her wonder about the world of instant electronic marvel come together in rhythm, melody, and orchestration. She sounds a lot like Mylene Farmer at her most magical, whispering her words (and her music) because the quieter the voice, the profounder its concentration.

When Miss Kittin first surfaced, with "Frank Sinatra," the viciously worded jet-set-and-fashionista satire that was given wide clubland exposure via inclusion in Danny Tenaglia’s London remix CD, she seemed a momentary electroclash novelty. Surely there could be no repeat. Yet there was one, "Stock Exchange," an equally poignant satire of conspicuous consumption included on the George V label’s Music from the Fashion Week Issue #3 compilation. At about the same time as this CD appeared, Kittin released Radio Caroline Vol. I (Emperor Norton), a DJ CD in which she displayed her song-segueing skills, programming sounds as various as Marshall Jefferson’s "Mushrooms," Alexander Robotnick’s 1980s Italo-disco "Dance Boy Dance," Jesper Dahlbeck’s warm-techno "Nyckelpiga," Autechre’s "Flutter," and Blaze’s soulful "Lovelee Dae" without throwing dancers off stride. Less impressive in this session were her remixes. As a turntable technician, Kittin falls short; but given her bulls-eye wit, her hooky and melodic song arranging, and her ear for bi-lingual puns and the mystery and paradox of life, I don’t think her fans will mind seeing her at a chanteuse’s mike. Out front is where Kittin belongs, singing what she sees, e-mailing her audience through the medium of her magic mask.


Issue Date: August 13 - 19, 2004
Back to the Music table of contents
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend
 









about the phoenix |  advertising info |  Webmaster |  work for us
Copyright © 2005 Phoenix Media/Communications Group