Lara
Fabian, a strong-voiced chanteuse born in Belgium but living in Montreal,
has just -- after six years of Quebec and French stardom -- released her
first English-language CD, Lara Fabian (Sony). Already it has
spawned a US hit, the diva-pop dance-beat song "I Will Love
Again," where Fabian sounds a lot like Celine Dion: strong and frank
and without a trace of fantasy or irony. Like Dion, Fabian loves in the
real world; she means to be noticed and taken seriously for what she is.
Just who she is, or feels herself to be, we're not shown. Still,
for those with a taste for the regal, even polemic romanticism that Barbra
Streisand brought to English-language pop, Fabian rings true. From a
declarative "I Am Who I Am" to the funky diva cut "Till I
Get Over You" and the plaintive "To Love Again" and
"Givin' Up on You," Fabian says her say and proves her strength
and endurance.
Because
they're so true to the Streisand-Dion idiom, the 13 songs on Lara
Fabian sound more convincing (if you're a Europop fan) than her three
French-language studio CDs (Lara Fabian, Carpe diem, and Pure).
To a Europop fan, Fabian's brute-force style -- and keyboardist Rick
Allison's unatmospheric accompaniments -- sound much too way-it-is. The
glory of female Europop -- its fanciful flights and introspective
idealisms, as voiced by delicate, almost whispering sopranos like France
Gall, Françoise Hardy, Mylene Farmer, and Zazie -- is that it does not
accept or dwell in the what-is. It yearns, imagines, enlarges the
emotional world, allowing the singer (and her fans) to reach out, on
instinct and dreams, to a universe of possibilities. Europop is
unreasonable but not unreasoning -- as the French saying has it, "Le
coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne comprend pas" ("The heart
has its reasons, which reason doesn't understand"). Fabian's
here-I-ams on the French-language albums said no such thing. That they
were able to sell hundreds of thousands of CDs to French-language pop fans
speaks volumes about the scene's increasing Americanization.
Exhibit
#1, of course, in this Americanization is Celine Dion, who began the adult
years of her career as a fiery soul-singing stylist -- upper-register,
delicate, and somewhat dreamy in the classic manner of Europop -- but made
her English-language move early in the 1990s and pretty soon took over.
Dion did not undermine Francophone pop taste -- indeed, D'eux and S'il
suffisait d'aimer, both produced in France by Jean-Jacques Goldman,
played to it. But by changing her style from the American
matter-of-factness of her English-language CDs to her French CDs' Europop
fancy, she compartmentalized it.
Dion's
worldwide success narrowed the reach of Europop; and because reaching is
central to the design of Europop, her work seriously damaged Europop's
inner credibility. Europop achieves a sublimity every bit as soulful as
the most righteous American soul music, but by other means; Dion's singing
-- and Fabian's -- is just soulful enough, in the American soul manner (in
"I Will Love Again" especially), to make a fan raise his or her
hands and strut about, without having to imagine, dislocate, or fantasize.
But
at least Dion has always asserted her Quebec patriotism. Even in US
concerts she talks of how proud she is to be a Québecoise and to
sing in French. Fabian is a Belgian with a Sicilian mother; she speaks
four languages, and though she lives in Montreal, she has no such Quebec
attachment. (If anything, her attachment is to Italian, in which language
she sings "Adagio," the final cut on Lara Fabian.) She
may have begun her career as a Francophone chanteuse, but her new songs
sound less contrived, freer, stronger than any of her Francophone hits.
This liberation finds its first revelation in her 1998 concert CD Lara
Fabian Live, where she covers France Gall's most sublime ballad,
"Évidemment," a duet in which two former lovers sing about
trying to recapture romance. Gall was full of ecstasy and tears, in a
sublime moment of intense bittersweetness. Fabian, committed only to the
what-is, simply shrugs the song's shoulders -- for her, as B.B. King once
put it, the feeling is gone.
That
said, her first English CD takes up where Celine Dion (now abandoning the
stage to be a mother) is leaving off. In gentle songs like "You Are
My Heart," "Part of Me," "Love by Grace," and
both versions of "Adagio," she offers a soft subtlety that's
quite a bit more complex (and rhythmic) than Dion's single-minded
affirmatives. Here too Allison's piano accompaniment opens up briefly into
a flute-and-synthesizer passage that feels almost Europop. "In
"Givin' Up on You," Fabian moves from gentleness to anger and
then to an exultation that changes everything -- and she does it so
smoothly, you accept it all as surely as she does. Most divas have one
style; Fabian has two: lithe and fierce in "Till I Get Over
You," brassy in "I Will Love Again." Dion's songs simplify
reality; Fabian's do not. Her music rewards close attention and more than
one listen.
The
Boston Phoenix