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In ‘Drapery’ Ratel C Attempts To Understand the Sexual Assault on Boys vis a vis School Bullying, and Homophobia: WATCH

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Ratel C  is a french pop-artist whose formal training in the fine arts and criticism unfolds magically in her new song and video for “Drapery.”

As a painter, Ratel C worked under the pseudonym Henjona and used to work on the concept of rebirth in various mediums especially performance art.

 

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She honed her vocal chops as a soloist in choirs in France and Denmark and formal training at the Berlin Comic Opera.

Waylaid by a chronic congenital condition, she found themselves bedridden, and unable to paint or sing in the classical way she was trained.  This sparked her to take up writing, and anticipating she would succumb to the illness, she composed an entire album to deal with her fear of death, while simultaneously exploring the nooks and crannies of her new voice, which while as deep as before, is much more hoarse and quite unusual for a woman.

She was determined to finish these songs even as she came precariously close to dying.

Ratel then began building herself a home studio to record  and produce the music. A life long user of Linux the not for profit open source UX interface, she built and tweaked a sound producing computer on an old Windows PC that lay the foundation of her home recording studio.

She then recorded a dozen self-produced songs, forging a new identity, Ratel C, under which she is also photographs and produced all the visuals for the website and the album. She adopted the name “Ratel” (honey badger in French)  after being triggered by a  nasty and hurtful ableist comment about her work that sent her into a tailspin until she saw a viral video in 2011 called “Honey badger doesn’t give a fuck.”

Honey Badger Doesn’t give a Fuck! was huge and subsequently surpassed 90 million views. The video and the titular mammal’s attitude galvanized her like an injection of steroids.

The “C” part of her new identity represents the coding language of computers that allowed her to stay connected to the world when she was bedridden, and that she uses to compose the electronic musical instruments of her songs.

Ratel C survived her expiration date when new a treatment emerged that got her back on her feet. The album, that began as a last will and testament of sorts, became the blueprint of her resurrection.

Her day-to-day routine now involves promoting her music, writing new songs, and relearning the languages she once spoke (she now can speak  6 of the 13 she knew as a child).

Ratel C has made a pact to walk from Marseille to Cassis as soon as the pandemic is over (a classic French joke if you’re provençal). Because she made the challenge publically she feels she can’t renege without eliciting ill will.  Adding, unpretentiously, that the walk would be a piece of cake, after all she once swam back to Marseille from the Château d’If Prison Island, not unlike Le Comte de Monté-Cristo in Alexandre Dumas’ book The Count of Monte Cristo.

Each song evokes an escape (in french, an escape is a “fugue”), a desire to vanish.  To be unaccountable for the consequences of  her actions as if she dropped off the grid.

Escape is not only the dominant theme of all the songs on the album, but applies to the sound of the fugues a sound that gives the impression of one musical instrument fleeing from another. 

The album begins with a story about a singular cat, then addresses how disabilities in relationships are often fraught and stigmatized, the pitfalls of trying to date as a single parent, and how pervasive homophobia and bullying still looms in children’s lives as she does on the last single, and first video, “Le Drapé”.

Watch the video below.

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