Christine and the Queens - Doesn't matter (voleur du soleil)

Language supremacy in music is a problem. The fact that people need to change their mother tongue in their songs to English just to please audiences and make it easier for them to have a chance in the very competed music industry beyond their national borders. Just think of how many great French bands and musicians the last decades have given us. Daft Punk, Air, Justice, Phoenix, M83... Now try to think of a single one that has an entire international career with songs in French; the only name that easily comes might be Yelle.

For a singer that bends quite a few norms for pop female artists, is quite frustrating to see Heloïsse Letissier dubbing each one of her songs to English just to please a foreign audience. Specially when a song works so well in French like Doesn't Matter (Voleur du Soleil), (the English version gets rid of the subtitle in brackets), specially being a track of pure pop dealing with deep existential questions in the same language that in the middle of XX Century had Sartre, Beauvoir and Camus dealing with such heavy topics.

The lyrics, like most existential works, have a dark subtone that is pessimistic about the sense of life that end up with the realization that "Doesn't matter (...) if I believe in God and if God does exist". Through the song there are quite a few nods to several themes that the French existentialists developed in their work: there's suicide as an answer to absurd from Camus, the God contradictions and the nothingness from Sartre, and the woman as an object on male gaze from Beauvoir, all of than in brief strokes of pop power. But then, after all that suffocation, Letissier offers an exit: being a sun thief, a poetic image that resonates with the existential maxim of individual freedom as the one and only possible sense of life. If you ever find your personal sun, steal it and don't let anybody else take it from you.

If for lyrics she went back to the 50's literature, for her music influences she approached the 80s pop, with drum machines and synth effects that make a tune very disco-friendly. If life is meaningless, we can either chose to suffer it, or find our own enjoyment among it. Christine and the Queens chose the latter.