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Celine Dion, higher than all the summits

Celine Dion at Paris Fashion Week, July 2, 2019. © Victor VIRGILE / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

11/15/2019

While the album Courage is out today and it started a few weeks ago the Courage World Tour , the Quebec singer savored a unique status on the world stage, in which her new songs are less and less at heart. of its actuality.

It is possible that the most important of a singer is not what she sings. Celine Dion, nearing the release of Courage , her twenty-seventh studio album, no longer interests the media - and therefore the public, we must believe - as much for his songs as for everything else.

Let's admit however that this "rest" is of a vertiginous romantic dimension. Her fairy tale with her impresario then husband, René Angélil, ended in January 2016, after years of bad omens erased by the smiles, declarations and successful news of a star whose psychological balance is, since the beginning of her career, as continuously displayed as Judy Garland's cracks over his own.

The tragedy finds its catharsis in May with Encore une soir , Jean-Jacques Goldman's shocking song then title of the self-titled album released in September, after a summer tour in the Francophonie. With 1.5 million copies sold, it will be the second album sale of the year in France.

In the English market, its revival of The Show Must Go On at a Billboard music awards ceremony in Las Vegas, also in May 2016, sounds like the announcement of a new era, in continuity with the previous one. Celine Dion is constantly present in the greedy eye of an industry celebrity news she accompanied the digital transformation.

It can pass, moreover, for a symbol of the mutation of an industry of the mass sale of CD to that of a massive consumption of images "stolen" or staged, which make fade the singer behind his character. Who better than she can embody the golden age of the global industry of popular music, since it is said that it happens to him, during a year, to sell a CD every twenty seconds! Golden Age, in fact: The Color of My Love in 1993 (20 million copies), From them in 1995 (10 million), Falling Into You in 1996 (32 million), Let's Talk About Love in 1997 ( 30 million), etc.

After the crisis of the disc appeared in North America then on all the markets of the developed countries, Celine Dion makes the choice of sedentariness in Las Vegas and, with two successive spectacles from 2003 to 2007 then from 2011 to 2019, it will be visited a thousand times by 4200 spectators at Cæsar's Palace. Tours intersect these two long residences, each time with impressive public records and recipes.

The image accompanies this triumphal bottom run. Céline's outfits, Celine's Fashion Week getaways, Celine's birthday friend Celine ... Nobody in the world knows about the occupations of a character who is both familiar and nestled on top of an Olympus of beauty, celebrity and wealth. Today, a widow, in her fifties and mistress of her destiny, Celine Dion continues to generously spread the stereotyped and perpetually renewed image of her impeccable plastic and indestructible smile.

Mad year in perspective

Announced by the single Flying On My Own (single flying last spring) and three other songs in September, the upcoming release of the album Courage is partly overshadowed by the rumor of the huge Courage World Tour . This tour of North America and Europe, from September 2019 to the summer of 2020, multiplies the performances in the speed of ticket sales (9 minutes, on October 9, for 55,000 tickets of Vieilles Charrues in July 2020) and the resale amount of these to the black market (up to 6000 euros, alert the press).

But everything promises to be rather wise during this crazy year: a majority of tubes in the setlist , some novelties of principle and confirmation that, if the range of the singer has lost a bit in the treble, his mastery of the medium and The bass still ensures vocal performances faithful to his legend.

Besides, could it exceed this one? Celine Dion is now free from any obligation of artistic renewal, even if new collaborations, among which Sia and David Guetta, widen her address book a little during Courage .

Like Edith Piaf or Elvis Presley in front of their own myth, how would Céline dethrone Celine? The summits she reached are among the Everest show business (number of albums sold by a female artist, number of spectators in Las Vegas, profitability of the tours ...), besides the inclusion of dozens of songs among the most great standards of popular music in English and French.

Now, the records to beat are fewer, as long as it still has the taste of overtaking. She knows she has become more than a star, that Canada will one day put her face on banknotes, that streets will bear her name ... The surprise is not so much that the creation is no longer at first. plan of her activity, but perhaps she still experiences the pleasure of singing - which is indisputable.

Celine Dion Courage (Columbia) 2019
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By: Bertrand Dicale

Celine Dion

French Song - Canada - Album

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