Alizée made her debut with the single, Moi… Lolita (2000), her most successful to date. It enjoyed success throughout most of Europe and parts of east Asia, reaching number one in several countries. Indeed, Alizée’s image was that of a seductive Lolita character, referring to the novel by Vladimir Nabokov. The video for the single showed Alizée as a village girl visiting a night-club. Four months after the single her debut album “Gourmandises” was released. The album written entirely by Farmer and Boutonnat, has sold over 1,3 million copies in France. It went Platinum in just three months. In 2001, the album, most of whose songs featured “risqué lyrics”, was launched internationally, and she became the highest-selling female French singer in 2001. The album went on to sell over 2 million copies worldwide. Farmer and Boutonnat kept a tight rein how the album was marketed and controlled the image in which Alizée was portrayed. In the mean time, Alizée gave very few interviews, and even when she did, they did not stretch beyond 20 minutes per journalist. Neither did she agree to any photoshoots. Her second single L’Alizé followed soon after. It was also successful giving her first number one in France, and gained some success internationally. The video of the “sexily alliterative” song shows Alizée amidst soap bubbles against a pink backdrop singing about herself. The video was shot in a studio in Brussels, which had a 25 metre by 10 metre painted canvas to serve as the background—with real bubbles. This single was followed up with another single from the same album - the title song, Gourmandises. The video, which shows a group of young boys and girls out on a picnic, was shot in a day. The last single from this album was Parler Tout Bas, which deals with the theme of dreams and a loss of innocence. In France, “Parler tout bas” was the third single followed by the release of “Gourmandises”. In 2003, Alizée returned with her second album “Mes Courants Électriques”. With the release of this album, she changed her image from a ‘Lolita’ to that of a more toned-down teenager. This album was also written by Farmer and Boutonnat. The style of the music didn’t change so much but the album was more critically acclaimed than the previous one. While it had much success in and outside France, worldwide it managed to sell 1.000.000 copies, half of its predecessor. This second album had an international version featuring English versions of four tracks. The first single from this album, J’en ai marre! was released in 2003. The music video for this shows Alizée in a glass cage, singing while having water splashed on her. The plexiglass cage, 3 by 3 meters in dimension, was constructed in a Parisian studio, and the shooting of the video took two days. An English-language version of this song, titled I’m Fed Up, was also released, and featured similar visuals for the music video. The other singles from this album were J’ai pas vingt ans and À contre-courant. Like J’en ai marre, J’ai pas vingt ans, Youpidou and Amelie M’a Dit also had English versions. The video for J’ai Pas Vingt Ans (I’m Not Twenty) resembles the ambience of a concert with Alizée dancing in the midst of several other dancers. À Contre-courant, the last single from this album, was shot in an abandoned coal factory. Unlike the other two singles, there was no English-language rendition of this song. Following the release of her second studio album, Mes Courants Électriques, Alizée toured around France and had with two performances in Belgium and Switzerland, during the second half of the year 2003. The tour started off with a performance on August 26, 2003 in Paris. It concluded with her performance on the eve of January 17, 2004 at the Le Zénith concert hall in Paris and had covered major cities including Lyon, Rouen, Lille, Grenoble and Dijon, among others. A live CD and DVD, titled “Alizée En Concert”, comprising of selected performances from her tour, was launched a year later in the fall of 2004. The audio CD contained tracks, taken from her two studio albums. The DVD featured video footage of the same performances as on the CD, along with bonus footage of her rehearsals. The compilation was re-released in early 2007 in Mexico by Universal music as a CD+DVD release, following the featuring of the songs in local radio stations. With the re-release and renewed interest, the songs climbed up the music charts in the country. The album became a hit, peaking at number 4 in the International Chart on May 28, 2007, and number 8 on the main albums chart. En concert has a Gold certification for shipments over 50,000 copies only in Mexico. Following her marriage in late 2003, Alizée has taken a hiatus from singing and has avoided appearing in the media since. Her first television appearance since then was on MTV France on February 18, 2006.|Since Alizée took a break from the music business, there was no confirmed official word regarding her comeback for almost 3 years. Her official site has been down since the summer of 2005. Since then, many rumors had surfaced, many of which eventually turned out to be false.|After almost two years of fan speculation, on April 3, 2006, a handwritten message, signed Alizée, was received by the webmaster of the fansite Le Nid d’Alizée, stating that she is working on the third album.|On July 7, 2006, the show Le JT de la musique on French TV channel “Europe 2 TV” reported that Alizée has separated from her former producer and song writer Mylène Farmer and is now working on her third album. It was also reported that the lyrics of the new album are being penned by Jean Faulques. Her husband, Jérémy Châtelain, is also associated with the album. He has since confirmed this information in an interview. Her third album Psychédélices was released in December of 2007, including the first single Mademoiselle Juliette. Despite the promotion it only had a moderate success in France, where it has reached number 16 on the albums chart. The album only held its peak position for one week on each chart and fell thereafter. The album became more of a success in Mexico, it debuted at number 44 in the Mexican Top 100 Albums Chart. The album peaked at number 15 in the main chart and number 1 in the international chart. It has sold 300,000 copies so far. Many of her fans were heavily disappointed by this album as it was not produced by Mylène Farmer and Laurent Boutonnat. The critics considered it as artistically inferior of her previous efforts. The lyrics in most cases are shallow and the production values were not as high as in Gourmandises and Mes Courants Électriques. Only one single was spawned in France from Psychédélices, called Mademoiselle Juliette. It missed the top 20 peaking at number 22. The second single release, Fifty-Sixty, peaked at number 65 in the Mexican single charts. In 2008 Alizée recorded a new studio version of Madonna’s hit single La Isla Bonita and was included on a special edition for her album, Psychédélices in Mexico. The song so far has gone on to become a hit becoming Alizée’s first top ten single on the national top ten airplay chart. |
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