Front Burner - Front Burner Presents Céline: Understood, Episode 3

Episode Date: December 26, 2024

Céline Dion is having a moment. It’s not her first. And millions of fans are hoping it won’t be her last. While Céline’s international stardom seems obvious now, it was all so unlikely. This is the third episode of the four-part series from Understood, the anthology podcast that takes you out of the daily news cycle and inside the events, people, and cultural moments you want to know more about. Hosted by Thomas Leblanc. More episodes of Understood are available at: https://link.mgln.ai/yrMjPh 

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi everybody, Jamie here. Happy holidays. I don't know about you, but it's certainly nice to clear my head from the grimness of the news for at least a few days. If you feel the same, you'll enjoy what we've got today. It's the third episode of a series that some of us here worked on for our sister feed, Understood. You might have heard me talking about it over the last couple of years.

This is the feed where we did seasons on Sam Bankman-Fried, Pornhub, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Celine Dion is the most recent season. We played episode two yesterday and episode one a few months back. If you missed those episodes, search Celine Understood and follow the feed while you're there. We've got some more seasons in progress

and that way you won't miss them. Okay, here's Celine Understood, episode three. And the record of the year is... My Heart Will Go On, Celine Dion. Celine was everywhere in the late 90s, particularly with the release of Titanic and My Heart Will Go On as its theme song. This is Carl Wilson. He's the author of a book about Celine called Let's Talk About Love, A Journey to the End of Taste. In 1997, you had both the biggest film of the era and one of the biggest songs of the era coming together. So they boosted one another.

What a shocker. And the Oscar goes to James Horner and Will Jennings for My Heart Will Go On. one of the biggest songs of the era coming together. So they boosted one another. What a shocker. And the Oscar goes to James Horner and Will Jennings for My Heart Will Go On, Titanic. The album of the year is Titanic. Celine Dion. And that meant that she was everywhere on radio. She was everywhere on television. She was everywhere on award shows.

Celine Dion. We're on television. She was everywhere on award shows. Celine Dion. My Heart Will Go On is one of the best-selling singles in history. And in the late 90s, it made Celine practically inescapable. Thank you so much. I think there's a natural human response to feeling that something is being pushed at you all the time.

And for a lot of people, Celine Dion was one of those kinds of things. And I think it's particularly intense with music because you can close your eyes, but you can't close your ears. So you're out in public. And if this music is playing everywhere you go, it starts to feel a little bit like some kind of infection, like some kind of plague. And it'll run through your head afterwards again, like whether you like it or not. The backlash that Celine would face in this era was intense. She inspired so much scorn in North America. But her level of superstardom also had another effect. Celine was able to connect with audiences in every corner of the world.

In ways that were completely planned for and totally unpredictable. Turning all that hate on its head. I'm Thomas LeBlanc and this is Celine Understood. Episode 3. The Globalization of Celine. There was a lot of strategizing going on all the time. This is Barry Garber, who you heard in the last episode. He was Celine's international touring agent throughout the 90s. In those days, the record label was very, very much involved in sort of monitoring where the record sales were happening, where the radio play was happening.

Remember, those days there was, you know, there was no internet. If you were getting fan mail, you were getting actual bags of mail that would arrive at the office and sit there in piles and piles until somebody could go through them. So it was really gathering data through all the international offices of the record company saying, well, you know, there's a groundswell here. You guys should really think about coming here and coming to tour here. Building a fan base in some markets was easier than others. Celine in France was a huge phenomenon. You know, I still remember clearly her being one of the first artists ever to perform at the Stade de France. And the Stade de France

holds 100,000 people. She filled it for two nights. And I think just the sheer size of it, the largest French-speaking country in the world, it was like royalty. I mean, she really is like a queen in France. Merci beaucoup. Merci. Céline started climbing the charts there in the 80s, even before she was a household name in Quebec.

After all, she was a household name in Quebec. After all, she was singing in French. From there, her fan base spread across the continent and beyond. Germany was big, Switzerland, Italy, the Scandinavian countries, Korea. We even went to Brunei, Australia, and then the most memorable international territory where we started and where I was very actively involved and got to go for the first time was Japan. At the time, foreign artists weren't getting much play in Japan. But Celine's label, Sony, was founded there, and they experimented with various promotional tools.

They thought it would be great to have Celine on a song for a TV series, and they put her together with a Japanese artist, a well-known violinist named Taro Hakase, and she recorded this song called To Love You More. To Love You More was a theme song for a soap opera on Fuji TV called Koi Bito Yo, The Lovers. It's this soaring love ballad where Celine starts soft and over time, it builds. I need to know I'll be waiting for you And then the Japanese pop star Miho Yonemitsu takes over

It became a number one single in Japan. And Celine doesn't just record songs in English and French and Japanese. She sings in German, Italian, Spanish, Italian, Spanish. She even sings in Mandarin. So there was suddenly an intercultural exchange in the way that global stardom was pursued that was not the same as it was when America just thrust everything it had out into the world and kind of expected people to lap it up. That's Carl again, the music writer you heard at the start of this episode.

Part of the reason that Céline was such a supple and useful figure for this kind of international marketing is that she didn't originate from the U.S. pop culture in the first place. She came from someplace else. Her fans were aware that she came from someplace else. They may not have had a very deep understanding of Quebec and Quebecois culture. They just had this sense of otherness, this sense of foreignness about what she was doing. Even in places where Celine wasn't actively marketed, people seemed to translate Celine's

music into their own lives and feel this connection. The traffic, we knew it was going to be crazy, but it was gridlock for miles. I mean, from what I understood, the traffic jam coming from the capital was like 60 miles long. That's the largest traffic jam that country's ever seen. This is Walter Elmore.

He's the producer of the Jamaican Jazz and Blues Festival. And he's talking about the time Celine headlined the festival in Montego Bay. People even left their car on the side of the road and walked the last half a mile to get to the stadium. I got reports of people breaking the heels off, ladies breaking the heels off their shoes. They didn't even care. They just kept coming. I had to literally go up to her dressing room, open the window, and I showed her the river of cars coming from every direction. And I asked her, would you please let us go on at least an hour later, hour and a half later, so these poor people get, they're coming here to see you. And she looked up, she said, coming to see me? And I said, yes.

So when I opened the window, she smelled the smell of cooking chicken. And she said, what was that? I said, it's Jamaican jerk chicken. So I said, I got her a plate and she waited. Soon, the venue filled up. We turned all the lights off in the stadium, every light. It was completely dark. And then she walks out on stage. The opening song was a song that I drove all night to get to you.

I'm assuming she did it because of the traffic. I had people call me after the show and said, we're walking through the gate and the song we're hearing, she must be singing it to us because we drove all night to get to see her. So it was so funny, but very cool and funny at the same time. The audience, people hugging their wives and hugging their girlfriends and a lot of crying going on, and they're singing every word to every song at the top of their lungs. It's amazing.

It's crazy to me all the different places I encounter this love for Celine. Did you hear about Celine on the radio, on TV? We used to buy DVDs. This past summer, I popped into a barbers shop in South London to get my beard trimmed. And as soon as I mentioned that I'm from Canada, the barber wanted to talk Celine Dion. Afrom Onyegbule grew up in Nigeria, listening to Celine's songs on bootleg DVDs. So why do you like Celine? What does she mean to you? I think one of the things that I could relate to

was the fact that she came from a big family and oftentimes there's always that hunger of wanting to like, they send their parents in poverty and that hunger of wanting not to live the life that their parents led and that was what I saw in Celine's life. Obviously she's musically talented but that

just from the fact that she came from that background that fueled her to where she is now you know I will always root for her anytime any day do you like the love songs yeah who doesn't want to be in love and it's reminding you just when the music is speaking a love language and it's reminding you about what love is what love speaking a love language, and it's reminding you about what love is, what love is, what love is, how sweet love is, and you start yearning, craving for it, and it just takes you there. That's the same way I feel when I'm connected to God through music. Like, it just speaks the language of God. Well, I feel Celine's music is very religious, actually.

Because you can change love for whatever God you have, and it totally works. God is love. But not all of Celine's global reach is organic, or even planned for by her people. Her global appeal is so immense that it can be manipulated in some unpredictable ways. that it can be manipulated in some unpredictable ways. There's kind of a famous maxim in entertainment culture in general, that nobody knows anything. You know, the very nature of trying to make popular culture is that you throw it out and hope it does the things that you hope it's going to do.

And very often it does different things than you intended it to do. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to,

50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo, 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. After 9-11 and the lead-up to the Iraq War, the U.S. government launched a cultural offensive, a sort of pop version of their war on terror, in the form of a new radio station called Radio Sawa, or Radio Together.

Radio Sawa in Washington. Rona America. It broadcast throughout the Middle East and specifically targeted Arab youth with pro-American messaging. There was a blend of short news, talk segments, and pop music by a mix of Arabic and English language artists, including you-know-who. The American government was aiming to win hearts and minds by pumping Celine Dion into people's ears. So during these days, Celine Dion came to our life. This is Zainab Al-Kaysi. During the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, Zainab was a teenager living with her sisters in Baghdad, and they

listened to Radio Sawa at home. It wasn't easy. We were a student, and there is a war, and sometimes you feel bad, or you hear some story about your neighbor or your relative. So you need something to help you. so you need something to help you. And we just listen to the Celine Dion songs, like My Heart Will Run, When I Need You, Come Back to Me.

Sometimes you need to be happy, so Celine Dion gives you happiness. And sometimes you feel bad, you want to cry. So Celine Dion helped you to cry. Sometimes I cried with her, even I don't know what is meaning, you know? And so, yes, there were times when the American government would use her music as sort of soft diplomacy in the rest of the world. On the other hand, there was a complexity to her presence in America. She had moments such as her Larry King interview during Hurricane Katrina. I'm watching and I'm especially waiting like the rest of the world. I'm waking up in the morning.

I'm having a coffee. I barely can swallow it. It's 2005, a little over two weeks after Hurricane Katrina touched down on the U.S. Gulf Coast. New Orleans is flooded and thousands of people, largely poor and Black, are stranded. Celine goes on CNN on this Larry King special. She's waving her arms. She seems genuinely distressed. There's people still there, waiting to be rescued.

And for me, it's not acceptable. I know there's reasons for it. I'm sorry to say I'm being rude, but I don't want to hear those reasons. She, in very rapid order, both made clear that she objected to the Iraq war. How come it's so easy to send planes in another country to kill everyone in a second to destroy? And supported the New Orleans citizens who were breaking into stores and so-called looting them. Some people are stealing and they're making a big deal out of it.

Oh, they're stealing 20 pairs of jeans or they're stealing television sets. Who cares? They're not going to go too far with it. Maybe those people are so poor, they've never touched anything in their lives. Let them touch those things for once. And it was a kind of radical statement on American television that, you know, nobody would have seen coming. But it reflected that she was from elsewhere. She had different values. She had kind of a left-wing point of view that is very commonplace in the aftermath of the Quiet Revolution in Quebec

that just didn't necessarily fall into American definitions of patriotism and that nobody expected from this kind of very sweet and usually quite pliant and cooperative woman. I'm not thinking with my head. I'm talking with my heart. Nobody can open the new roofs. The helicopter's flying in. Take two people at a time. Take a kayak. Go into those walls.

After Celine's appearance on CNN, clips of it start to circulate online with captions like, Celine Dion goes crazy. I admit, it's an odd interview. She's so emotional, so over the top. To me, it all feels very sincere, very Celine. Still, she's mocked for it, which isn't really surprising because by this point, Celine's been the butt of the joke for years. It became almost a trope in the late 90s. The sort of Celine Dion insults were kind of cast off willy-nilly through that period and into the early 2000s at least.

And you had everything from, you know, comedy show parodies as on Saturday Night Live. I was born the youngest of 14 children in Charlemagne, Quebec. Holy cow, that's a lot of kid. No wonder I'm so skinny. But God made it up to me when he gave me the best voice in the world. No kidding. Please welcome my father. I mean, my husband, Rene. You had, I forget what year the South Park movie was, but the Blame Canada song

pointedly said that if we got rid of Canada, then there'd be no Celine Dion and that this would be a wonderful thing. Celine Dion and that this would be a wonderful thing. And these were just the comedic parodies. All the time in the press, you had a level of invective that's frankly shocking to look back at now. Celine Dion was used as a shorthand for all of kind of cheap, commercial, meaningless pop culture. If somebody asked me what I thought of Celine Dion, I'm sure I would have said, I hate Celine Dion.

And I was far from alone. It's true. Even me. I loved Celine as a kid. But by the late 90s, I found her too mainstream, too cheesy. My friends would all make jokes about her. It just wasn't cool to be into Celine Dion. Part of the way that people make themselves feel individual and special

is by rejecting the thing that everyone seems to be into and approaching the idea of everyone as kind of a mask that you make different from yourself and assume are dumber than you and are the puppets who are just being pushed around by the entertainment industry. And so there's a pleasure in rejecting the thing that is ubiquitous. So as ubiquitous as Celine's glamorous success and popularity was, was this backlash and contempt for her. What was it that got her under people's skin, really? I think that the kind of music that Celine produced, first of all, especially in the English language music, I think it's quite different in the frank funk catalog the music was geared towards maximum effect towards maximum

motion often at the expense of any sort of more subtle strains that might make it have any level Every night in my dreams, I see you, I feel you. You know, the stereotypical Celine Dion song is a power ballad that starts at a fairly intense level. Near, far, wherever you are. And then crescendos from there till the end. Rising in key on every chorus or simply getting louder and louder and louder all the way. And soaked in more orchestral arrangements and bigger drums. All of these things that felt like they were trying to reach out

and throttle you and force you into submission. And that was the thing that I think a lot of people resented. And it was done in the pursuit of emotions that often felt very sentimental and what people would call schmaltzy. But Carl sees other factors at play too. I think Céline suffered very much by a bunch of prejudices that people came to her with. One of them, obviously gender. She was doing sort of ultra-feminine music, and certainly she wasn't cool to young feminists because she had this kind of throwback image, and she wasn't cool to misogynists in the media. On a class level, I think it was kind of a knee-jerk detection that

there was nothing sophisticated about her. Definitely there was some fun made of the fact that she came from this enormous French-Canadian Catholic family, you know, in a somewhat rural setting. So she would be perceived as a hick. She didn't have any of the reference points and markers that would bespeak an educated person moving through culture in a savvy kind of way. And that's ultimately a class distinction, but it's one that we don't often understand to be a class distinction. As for Celine, she seems to take the mockery and the hate of the 90s in stride. In 1997, journalist Bryant Gumbel

asked Celine about her many critics. One guy wrote called Calculated Schmaltz. What does that mean? You tell me. Another guy said that it was cold and mechanical. That the songs are formula.

Doesn't bother you in the least? formula. You know. It doesn't bother you in the least. No. No. I just came back from a wonderful tour in Europe. One place was 75,000 people. I would love this person to go on stage and tell them that exact phrase. If you think it's cold and mechanical and the whole thing is they're all stupid 75 000 people are stupid

my turnaround on cillian really came in the process of writing my book i was beginning to question the prejudices that I held in the way that I organized the musical world in my head. As a North American pop culture observer, I tended to take Cillian on face value and to see in her the kind of slick pop production that in many ways the people who were marketing her wanted me to see. But looking into her reception around the world and the complex ways that people embraced her really did alter my sense of how much depth there was in this music and in this person's persona. was in this music and in this person's persona. Specifically, I think the real sincerity and humor and lovableness of Celine as a much less constructed and controlled and polished persona than I'd realized inspired a true affection in me. than I'd realized inspired a true affection in me.

As research for his book, Carl goes to a Celine Dion concert. And there, the ideas that he'd been examining in his writing became a lot less abstract. I was just coming out of a separation and divorce. And so that rendered me kind of emotionally vulnerable at the time. So I sat in the audience and for the first, well, the show had the effect on me that I expected, which is that it felt overproduced. Then gradually both Celine's performance and I think the love of the people in the

room for her started to sort of take hold of me. And late in the show, she sang Because You Loved Me. And I had a bit of a revelation at that moment. I felt the personal connection to the things I was going through and to the memories I had of my marriage and of the end of the marriage and what it felt like to be looking back on something. And suddenly the song felt not at all extreme. It felt appropriate to the scale of those kinds of emotions.

Celine would be subject to many personal and cultural re-evaluations throughout her career. But by the end of the century, the spotlight gets to be too much for Celine. I don't know what to talk about anymore. I've been giving, I've been talking about everything. I've been singing in English, in French, in Japanese, in German, in Italian, in Spanish. I don't even speak those languages. I feel sorry about not being able to speak those languages. I wish I could. I travel the world and I don't even know, I haven't seen nothing.

People ask me the questions. Tell me and tell us and what do you think and what do you think? And I don't know. I've done everything and I've done nothing, to be honest with you. I haven't been to school. I stopped going to school. I was 16 years old, I think, and I can't even remember. I don't know too much about life.

I sing. I use people words. Jean-Jacques Goldman, Eddie Marinet, Luc Plamondon. Everybody who's been writing me songs. Carole King. They're wonderful words.

I need to know. I need to learn about the meaning of every of those words. I need to be with my family and friends. We want to try to have a child. I need to be home and be a woman. I need to know my husband. I'm 30 years old.

I think I deserve a break. In the year 2000, at the peak of her career, Celine steps back from performing. She'll be gone for about two years. And in that time, she'll give birth to a son, René Charles. And when she decides to return to the stage, she doesn't want to tour the world anymore. She wants the world to come to her. And so, René makes one of his biggest business deals yet, and gets Caesars Palace to build Celine her very own concert hall in Las Vegas, the Coliseum. At the time, a lot of people thought the Vegas Strip was where a career in show business went to die.

Celine's Vegas residencies would prove to be one of the smartest music business decisions of the century, selling over 4.5 million tickets over the course of 16 years, raking in hundreds of millions of dollars. A show so successful, many credit it with turning the whole city's economy and reputation around. Celine and Rene would build a life in Vegas, raising three children there. And then, in 2016, Celine would be forced to start a new chapter and reinvent herself again, this time on her own.

As soon as Rene died, we were all going, what's going on here? What's going to happen here? What are you going to do next? You know. That's next time on the final episode of Celine Understood. The show was produced by Crystal Duhaime and Zoe Tennant, with showrunner Imogen Burchard. Sound design by Crystal Duhaime, with sound engineering by Julia Whitman.

Roshni Nair is our coordinating producer. Executive producers are Chris Oak and Nick McCabe-Locos. In order of appearance, audio from CBS and the Recording Academy, Fox Broadcasting Company and Billboard, Disney ABC and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, CBS and the People's Choice Awards, Sony Music Entertainment, Sony Music Entertainment Japan, Columbia Records, the YouTube channel CCTV1, Radio Sawa, CNN, NBC, and Paramount Pictures. Celine Understood is a co-production of CBC Podcasts and CBC News.

You can follow Understood and listen to previous seasons on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.