Skip to main content

Kiddy Smile: ‘People in France were upset I was black, gay – and proud’

When he got a surprise invite to perform for President Emmanuel Macron, the musician, DJ and dancer faced down his critics with a bold and provocative statement

Kiddy Smile towers over me. I am 6ft 3in, and feel petite next to him. He is relatively svelte at the moment, having been ill during the past year with phlebitis and “the beginning of a pulmonary embolism”, but he has always been defined by being, in his own words, “fat and tall”. But this is, in part, what led Pierre Hache from being a kid from the Paris banlieues becoming a charismatic house artist, whose debut album One Trick Pony is a celebration of his identity as a black, gay man. It is enormously sexual, at times squelchingly acidic, and huge fun – energy he also parlays into his appearance in Gaspar Noé’s new dance-troupe movie, Climax.

In June, Kiddy Smile was invited to DJ at an event at the Elysée. He agreed, assuming it was at Elysée Montmartre, a club everyone refers to by the first part of its name. Then his manager called to say President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte wanted to do something with him. “I laughed. ‘Macron isn’t going there!’ My manager said: ‘No, we’re going to the presidential palace. I’ve just been doing your security clearance.’”

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2orpIjq
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4
Post a Comment
Read more

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV
Post a Comment
Read more

When Brooklyn was queer: telling the story of the borough's LGBTQ past

In a new book, Hugh Ryan explores the untold history of queer life in Brooklyn from the 1850s forward, revealing some unlikely truths For five years Hugh Ryan has been hunting queer ghosts through the streets of Brooklyn, amid the racks of New York’s public libraries, among its court records and yellow newspaper clippings to build a picture of their lost world. The result is When Brooklyn Was Queer, a funny, tender and disturbing history of LGBTQ life that starts in an era, the 1850s, when those letters meant nothing and ends before the Stonewall riots started the modern era of gay politics. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2H9Zexs
Post a Comment
Read more