Cerrone & Redcar – Catching Feelings

Next, Wayne takes us to the disco… en France!

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[6.62]Wayne Weizhen Zhang: “Catching Feelings” could be just another tantalizingly seductive hit in Red’s discography, but there’s depth beneath the disco slink. As for why this track is credited to the Christine and the Queens moniker as opposed to his current name, Red has spoken about how revisiting the name is about rewriting the legacy of who he has been without needing to abandon it, leaning into a cultivated aesthetic without sacrificing his current manhood. So when he sings, “Take a chance/Understand/I could be/Be your man,” it’s not just a come-on; it’s a reclamation of a public coming out narrative, what it means to change the names while having an already established musical identity associated with another gender, and what it means to create a new identity while also potentially appropriating others. (After controversy about picking an Arabic sounding name, Rahim Claude Redcar, he often just goes by “Redcar” or simply “Red”.) None of this complicated narrativizing would work, of course, if the music didn’t: combined with Cerrone’s legendary production, the dense but lush labyrinth of sound is nothing short of revelatory bliss.
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Alfred Soto: The bass thumps in the right places and Rahim Redcar cosplays as Sultry Tempter. What keeps me from full embrace is its vacuum-sealed evocation of “disco.” Somebody remix this baby.
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Katherine St. Asaph: Chris brings the Michael Jackson vocals, all gasps and gulps and urgency. Either he or Cerrone — I can’t tell — forgot to bring a full song. (Perhaps I can provide one: somebody remix this over Odyssey.mid.)
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Dave Moore: “Accept no substitutes” in full effect. Feels like a miracle for this sort of disco throwback to really land, but Cerrone makes the sound work, and Redcar sells the hell out of it.
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Ian Mathers: I’ve accepted that I’ll probably just always find Redcar’s singing style/voice vaguely annoying (kind of like Miley… in terms of my reaction, not what they sound like). But a peppy little Cerrone number is probably the ideal setting for it, to me.
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Nortey Dowuona: The spine of Cerrone’s “Supernature” was the simple, easily assembled drumbeat. It comfortably locks into a groove and never dares to curve off into any unwanted tangents. It allows the keys and synthesizers to scatter and wrinkle as Lene Lovich rides the rhythm with range and rhythmic poise, a perfect imagineer disco vocalist. The actual core of the story just flew right over my clumsy hands twice — it’s meant to be about fertilizers creating James Fauntleroy-sounding creatures who take us out — but fundamentally, that drumbeat is the true meaning of the song. Everything and anyone will and can change in this well-assembled world, except the drums. At the Olympics opening ceremony, “Supernature” became an even greater and bolder behemoth, but as I hear the song shorn of the lovely imagery and staging that it was meant to cocoon, the drumbeat still never changes. Cerrone’s biggest and most signature hit, it demonstrates what his audience demands: the wild, untamed imagineering of a musical professional with a steady hand below preventing each balloon from deciding to start its own song. So, I then turn away from the gleeful ambition of this megahit to Chris’s stab at it, co-produced by Purple Disco Machine, he of the pistol and the mallet. Unlike other timid remakes already covered, it has a firm, explicit drumbeat, similar to the original but glossier and louder, if not more complete and steady. But the imagineering is long gone — now mostly concept art of what a remake of “Supernature” could be by Cerrone — left to the contractor Timo Piontek. The assembly of loops of bass, piano, synthesizer and keys just gum up the works and remind you of how most remixes, far from enhancing or even reassembling the original, simply absorb it into the bland acceptable style of the present. The reason I took you on that whole little soliloquy is to explain to you that when I hear “Catching Feelings,” I hear the same level of bland acceptability, leavened with that drumbeat.
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Will Adams: The sturdy disco reminds me of last year’s Kylie & The Blessed Madonna team-up, but with more cruise control. Any real heft that’s there comes from Chris’s vocals.
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Tim de Reuse: The synthpop environment is detailed and well-executed, but it’s also the kind of nu-disco party-ambience that flows by the liter out from metropolitan France like all its other highly regulated cultural outputs. Chris’s pristine vocals are what catch the ear: the awkwardness of how the word “catching” in “Catching Feelings” munches its own vowels, and the sense that every syllable is highly affected, over-accentuated, and crispier than it perhaps ought to be. On first listen, it irritated me — on second listen, well, it still irritated me, but I started finding it catchy.
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