2023-07-28 18:00:04
Aluna Francis in Los Angeles on July 14. PAT MARTIN FOR M WORLD MAGAZINE
You had to see her struggle, on Sunday June 4, at the We Love Green festival in Paris, to achieve three things at the same time. On stage, Aluna Francis, in an apple green outfit, was both the DJ, the singer and the dancer of her own show in front of a crowd of young people who came as much for the stars of French rap Orelsan or Dinos as for the rockers from Phoenix or the American Skrillex. Under a blazing sun, just after the concert of the French singer Pomme, the Briton demonstrated that the black voices of house music or dance in general should no longer remain invisible, hidden behind the names of the DJs, often white, who invited them to sing on their hits without really mentioning them in the credits.
Aluna Francis is a fighter who, on July 7, published her second solo album, Mycelium, and whose hobbyhorse is to have the place of black women recognized in electronic music. During the summer of 2022, on the occasion of the release of the album Renaissance, of Beyoncé, who, according to her, “finally recalled the black roots of house music », she published a column on the subject in the feminist magazine Gal-Them. She herself too often experienced this invisibility when she formed with the guitarist and producer George Reid the avant-garde R’n’B pop duo AlunaGeorge, and when she was invited by groups like Disclosure or by the French DJ Snake.
She wrote thus: “I’ve often been featured on tracks where my face can’t be found, so no one even knows I’m black,” and to recall the destiny of these singers who “have been the often uncredited or unseen voice and soul of mainstream dance music over the decades”, as Loleatta Holloway on Ride on Time, de Black Box, Martha Wash sur Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now), of C+C Music Factory, and Jocelyn Brown on The Power, from Snap!, in the late 1980s and early 1990s. .
Survive at all costs
To remedy this lack of visibility, Aluna Francis found a solution: in addition to being a performer and author, she became a DJ and therefore resolved to sing at the same time as she mixed her music. ” It’s a lot of work, she acknowledges, but you just have to be in time. When you hear the end of your song, you have to come back into that mix at the next song, cue your record while you sing. There are so many fun little technicalities to overcome. That too is revenge. For a long time, I was not allowed to touch the turntables for fear that I would scratch the records”, she quips with a burst of laughter.
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