Céline Episode 3: The Globalization of Céline

Summary

Understood: Who Broke the Internet?
Season 5, Episode 3: The Globalization of Céline

Release Date: October 29, 2024
Host: Carl Wilson
Produced by CBC

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Introduction: Céline Dion's Meteoric Rise

The episode opens by highlighting Céline Dion's immense presence in the late 1990s, particularly fueled by the global success of the film Titanic and its iconic theme song, "My Heart Will Go On." Host Carl Wilson sets the stage by recounting how these two cultural phenomena synergistically elevated Céline to near-ubiquitous fame.

Carl Wilson [00:37]: "My Heart Will Go On Céline Dion."

Celine's Dominance (00:45 - 02:17)
Carl Wilson emphasizes that in 1997, both Titanic and "My Heart Will Go On" were monumental successes that mutually reinforced each other's popularity. The song became one of the best-selling singles in history, making Céline "practically inescapable" across various media platforms.

Ian Urbina [01:45]: "For a lot of people, Celine Dion was one of those kinds of things. ... it'll run through your head afterwards. Again, like, whether you like it or not."

Global Marketing and Strategic Expansion

Building an International Fanbase (03:07 - 07:38)
Barry Garber, Céline's international touring agent, discusses the strategic efforts behind expanding her fanbase globally during an era without the Internet. By meticulously analyzing record sales and radio play across different regions, the team identified burgeoning markets and planned tours accordingly.

Barry Garber [03:07]: "In those days, the record label was very, very much involved in sort of monitoring where the record sales were happening..."

Céline's success in France is particularly notable, where she was celebrated akin to royalty, performing multiple sold-out shows at the Stade de France. Her ability to sing in multiple languages—English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and even Mandarin—facilitated her connection with diverse international audiences.

Barry Garber [04:21]: "Celine started climbing the charts there in the 80s, even before she was a household name in Quebec."

Celine Dion's Cultural Impact and Backlash

Ubiquity and Backlash in North America (07:50 - 20:52)
Céline Dion's pervasive presence in media led to a significant backlash in North America. She became a symbol of mainstream, commercial pop culture, which attracted scorn and ridicule. Parodies on platforms like Saturday Night Live and South Park often targeted her, portraying her as emblematic of "cheap, commercial, meaningless pop culture."

Ian Urbina [19:58]: "If somebody asked me what I thought of Celine Dion, I'm sure I would have said, I hate Celine Dion."

This backlash was partly driven by societal desires to assert individuality by rejecting what was seen as over-commercialized and ubiquitous. Additionally, prejudices related to gender, class, and cultural origins influenced public perception, making Céline an easy target for criticism.

Ian Urbina [22:37]: "Celine suffered very much by a bunch of prejudices that people came to her with. One of them, obviously gender..."

Soft Diplomacy and Contrasting Public Persona

Use of Céline's Music in US Cultural Initiatives (13:25 - 16:45)
The American government leveraged Céline Dion's music as part of soft diplomacy efforts, particularly through Radio Sawa during the Iraq War. This radio station aimed to influence Middle Eastern youth by blending pro-American messaging with pop music, including Céline's songs.

Unknown [14:13]: "So during these days, Celine Dion came to our life."

However, Céline's public persona sometimes clashed with her role in such initiatives. A notable moment was her emotionally charged appearance on CNN during Hurricane Katrina, where she voiced strong opinions against the Iraq War and criticized looting in New Orleans. This unexpected stance showcased her different values and left a lasting impact.

Zeyneb Al Kasi [16:33]: "Some people are stealing and they're making a big deal out of it. ... Let them touch those things for once."

Personal Stories: Céline's Global Reach

Fan Experiences Around the World (10:19 - 11:53)
The episode features personal anecdotes from fans globally, illustrating Céline's widespread influence. Afram Onyegbule from Nigeria shares how Céline's music resonated with her during difficult times, highlighting universal themes of love and resilience.

Afram Onyegbule [10:50]: "I think one of the things that I could relate to was the fact that she came from a big family... I will always root for her, anytime, any day."

Similarly, Zeyneb Al Kasi from Baghdad recounts how Céline's songs provided emotional solace during the turmoil of the Iraq War, underscoring the therapeutic power of her music.

Zeyneb Al Kasi [14:32]: "... we listened to the Celine Dion songs Light my heart will when I need you come back to me."

Céline Dion: Personal Struggles and Reinvention

Facing Criticism and Personal Challenges (17:11 - 23:39)
Céline Dion's career was not without personal and professional challenges. The episode delves into her feelings of being overworked and the emotional toll of relentless criticism. In interviews, Céline expressed a desire for a simpler life, yearning for deeper personal connections and a break from her demanding career.

Walter Elmore [27:11]: "I need to be home and be a woman. I need to know my husband. ... I think I deserve a break."

Despite the overwhelming fame, Céline remained grounded, emphasizing her lack of formal education and her dependence on songwriters to craft her music. Her candid admissions reveal a vulnerable side often overshadowed by her public image.

Las Vegas Residency and Economic Impact (28:58 - 30:24)
In a strategic pivot, Céline Dion retired from global touring in 2000 to focus on a highly successful Las Vegas residency at the Colosseum at Caesars Palace. This move not only revitalized her career but also significantly boosted Las Vegas's economy and reputation as a premier entertainment destination.

Ian Urbina [29:58]: "So successful, many credit it with turning the whole city's economy and reputation around."

Her residency continued to draw millions of fans over 16 years, cementing her legacy and showcasing her ability to adapt and thrive in changing musical landscapes.

Reflections and Conclusion

Changing Perspectives and Lasting Legacy (24:39 - 27:28)
Host Ian Urbina shares a personal transformation in his perception of Céline Dion, stemming from his experience attending one of her concerts during a period of emotional vulnerability. Initially skeptical of her overproduced performances, he eventually connected deeply with her music, recognizing its genuine emotional resonance.

Ian Urbina [26:00]: "I had a bit of a revelation at that moment. ... it felt appropriate to the scale of those kinds of emotions."

This newfound appreciation reflects the episode's broader theme of reevaluating prejudices and understanding the depth behind Céline's persona and artistry.

Final Chapter and Future Directions (30:32 onwards)
The episode concludes by touching upon Céline Dion's personal losses and her ongoing journey of self-reinvention. Following the death of her son René-Charles, Céline faces new challenges, prompting listeners to anticipate her next steps in the final episode of Céline.

Carl Wilson [30:07]: "Celine and Renee 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."

Key Takeaways

• Global Strategy: Céline Dion's international success was meticulously planned, leveraging her multilingual abilities and strategic market expansion.

• Cultural Impact: Her pervasive presence led to both adoration and significant backlash, reflecting broader societal attitudes toward mainstream pop culture.

• Personal Resilience: Despite immense fame and criticism, Céline maintained a grounded personal life, navigating her career with vulnerability and adaptability.

• Legacy of Reinvention: Her Las Vegas residency exemplifies successful career adaptation, ensuring her lasting impact on both the music industry and global culture.

Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Carl Wilson [00:37]: "My Heart Will Go On Céline Dion."

• Ian Urbina [01:45]: "... it'll run through your head afterwards. Again, like, whether you like it or not."

• Barry Garber [03:07]: "In those days, the record label was very, very much involved..."

• Afram Onyegbule [10:50]: "I think one of the things that I could relate to was the fact that she came from a big family..."

• Zeyneb Al Kasi [14:32]: "... we listened to the Celine Dion songs Light my heart will when I need you come back to me."

• Ian Urbina [22:37]: "Celine suffered very much by a bunch of prejudices that people came to her with."

• Walter Elmore [27:11]: "I need to be home and be a woman..."

• Ian Urbina [26:00]: "I had a bit of a revelation at that moment..."

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Transcript

[Ian Urbina]

World Ocean day is upon us. But can we really talk about 2/3 of the earth's surface in just one day? Absolutely not. I'm Ian Urbina, back with an all new season of the Outlaw Ocean. My podcast delves into the impossibly vast and shockingly lawless world of the open seas. Find and follow an all new season of the Outlaw Ocean wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast and the.

[Carl Wilson]

Record of the year is.

[Ian Urbina]

Who Is it?

[Afram Onyegbule]

Who is It?

[Carl Wilson]

My Heart Will Go On Celine Dion.

[Ian Urbina]

Celine was everywhere in the late 90s, particularly with the release of Titanic. And My Heart Will Go on as his theme song.

[Carl Wilson]

This is Carl Wilson. He's the author of a book about Celine called Let's Talk About A Journey to the End of taste.

[Ian Urbina]

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.

[Walter Elmore]

What a shocker.

[Carl Wilson]

And the Oscar goes to James Horner.

[Ian Urbina]

And Will Jennings for My Heart Will Go On Titanic. The album of the year is Titanic.

[Zeyneb Al Kasi]

Celine Dion.

[Ian Urbina]

And that meant that she was everywhere on radio, she was everywhere on television, she was everywhere on award shows. Celine Dion.

[Carl Wilson]

My Heart Will Go on is one of the best selling singles in history. And in the late 90s, it made Celine practically inescapable.

[Walter Elmore]

Thank you so much.

[Ian Urbina]

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.

[Carl Wilson]

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 three, the globalization of Celine.

[Barry Garber]

There was a lot of strategizing going on all the time.

[Carl Wilson]

This is Barry Garber who you heard in the last episode. He was Celine's international touring agent throughout the 90s.

[Barry Garber]

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. It was 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.

[Carl Wilson]

Building a fan base in some markets was easier than others.

[Barry Garber]

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, you know, the largest French speaking country in the world. It was like royalty. I mean, she really is like a queen in France.

[Ian Urbina]

Merci.

[Walter Elmore]

Boo.

[David Duchovny]

Boo.

[Walter Elmore]

Merci.

[Carl Wilson]

Celine started climbing the charts there in the 80s, even before 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.

[Barry Garber]

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.

[Carl Wilson]

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.

[Barry Garber]

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 youe More.

[Walter Elmore]

Take me back into the arms I.

[Carl Wilson]

Love To Love youe More was a theme song for a soap opera on Fuji TV called Koibito yo the Lovers. It's this soaring love ballad where Celine starts soft and over time it builds. 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. She even sings in Mandarin.

[Ian Urbina]

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.

[Carl Wilson]

That's Carl again, the music writer you heard at the start of this episode.

[Ian Urbina]

Part of the reason that Celine was such a supple and Useful figure for this kind of international marketing is that she didn't originate from the US 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.

[Carl Wilson]

Even in places where Celine wasn't actively marketed, people seemed to translate Celine's music into their own lives and feel this connection.

[David Duchovny]

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.

[Carl Wilson]

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.

[David Duchovny]

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, 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.

[Carl Wilson]

Soon the venue filled up.

[David Duchovny]

We turn all the lights off in the stadium, every light that's completely dark, and then she walks out on stage. The opening song was the song that 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, you know, 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, the people hugging their wives and hugging their girlfriends and a lot of crying going on and the singing everywhere, to every song at the top of their lungs. It's amazing.

[Carl Wilson]

It's crazy to me, all the different places I encounter this love for Celine. Did you hear about Celine, like, on the radio, on TV we used to buy DVDs. This past summer, I popped into a barbershop 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.

[Afram Onyegbule]

That's how we learned all her music.

[Carl Wilson]

Afram 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?

[Afram Onyegbule]

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 seen 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 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.

[Carl Wilson]

Do you like the love songs?

[Afram Onyegbule]

Yeah. Who doesn't want to be in love? And he's reminding you just when the music is 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.

[Carl Wilson]

Well, I feel Celine's music is very religious, actually, because you can change love for whatever God you have, and it totally works.

[Afram Onyegbule]

Yes, God is love.

[Ian Urbina]

Yeah.

[Carl Wilson]

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.

[Ian Urbina]

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.

[Thomas LeBlanc]

Hi, everyone. I'm David Duchovny. Join me on my podcast, Fail Better, where we use failure as a lens to reflect on the past and analyze the current moment. I speak with makers and performers like Rob Lowe, Rosie o' Donnell, and Kenya Barris, as well as thinkers like Kara Swisher and Nate Silver, to understand how both personal setbacks and larger forces impact our world. Listen to Fail Better wherever you get your podcasts.

[Carl Wilson]

After 9 11, in the lead up to the Iraq war, the US 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 Min Washington. 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.

[Unknown]

So during these days, Celine Dion came to our life.

[Carl Wilson]

This is Zeyneb Al Kasi during the 2003American invasion of Iraq. Zeyneb was a teenager living with her sisters in Baghdad and they listened to Radio Sawa at home.

[Unknown]

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. And we just listened to the Celine Dion songs Light my heart will want when I need you come back to me. Sometimes you need to be happy so serendian give you happiness and sometimes you feel bad, you want to cry so selenje only help you to cry sometimes I tried with her, even I don't know what is meaning, you know.

[Ian Urbina]

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.

[Zeyneb Al Kasi]

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.

[Carl Wilson]

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.

[Zeyneb Al Kasi]

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.

[Ian Urbina]

She, in very rapid order, both made clear that she objected to the Iraq war.

[Zeyneb Al Kasi]

How come it's so easy to send planes in another country to kill everyone.

[Ian Urbina]

In a second to destroy and supported the New Orleans citizens who were breaking into stores and so called looting them.

[Zeyneb Al Kasi]

Some people are stealing and they're making a big deal out of it. Oh, they're stealing 20 pair 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.

[Ian Urbina]

And it was a kind of radical statement on American television that 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.

[Zeyneb Al Kasi]

I'm not thinking with my head, I'm talking with my heart. Nobody can open any roofs. The helicopters flying in. Take two people at a time. Take a kayak, go into those walls.

[Carl Wilson]

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.

[Ian Urbina]

It became almost a trope in the late 90s for these 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 comedy show parodies, as on Saturday Night Live.

[Walter Elmore]

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, Rudy.

[Ian Urbina]

You had. I forget what year the south park movie was, but the Blame Canada song. Blame Canada, Blame Canada pointedly said that if we got rid of Canada, then there'd be no Celine Dion, and that this would be a wonderful thing.

[Carl Wilson]

And these were just the comedic parodies.

[Ian Urbina]

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 alumni.

[Carl Wilson]

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.

[Ian Urbina]

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 mass 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.

[Carl Wilson]

What was it that got her under people's skin, really?

[Ian Urbina]

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 of complexity.

[Walter Elmore]

Every night in my dreams I see.

[Ian Urbina]

You I feel, you know, the stereotypical Celine Dion song is a power ballad that starts at a fairly intense level 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.

[Carl Wilson]

But Carl sees other factors at play too.

[Ian Urbina]

I think Celine 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.

[Carl Wilson]

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.

[Ian Urbina]

One guy wrote called Calculated Schmaltz.

[Walter Elmore]

What does that mean?

[Ian Urbina]

You tell me. Calculated Schmaltz. Another guy said that it was cold and mechanical. That the songs are formula, you know. Doesn't bother you in the least?

[Walter Elmore]

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. An exact phrase. If you think it's cold and mechanical and the whole thing is they are stupid. 75,000 people are stupid.

[Ian Urbina]

My turnaround on Celine 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 Celine 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 specifically. I think the real sincerity and humor and lovableness of. Of Celine as a much less constructed and controlled and polished Persona than I'd realized inspired a true affection in me.

[Carl Wilson]

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.

[Ian Urbina]

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 while 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.

[Carl Wilson]

Celine would be subject to many personal and cultural reevaluations throughout her career. But by the end of the century, the spotlight gets to be too much for Celine.

[Walter Elmore]

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 Goleman, 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 who 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.

[Carl Wilson]

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, Rene 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 Rene makes one of his biggest business deals yet and gets Cesar's palace to build Celine her very own concert hall in Las Vegas, the Colosseum. At the time, a lot of people thought the Vegas strip was where a career in show business went to die. Instead, 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.

[Ian Urbina]

Dollars a show so successful, many credit it with turning the whole city's economy and reputation around.

[Carl Wilson]

Celine and Renee 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.

[Ian Urbina]

As soon as Renee died, we were all going, what's going on here? What's going to happen here? What you going to do next? You know.

[Carl Wilson]

That'S next time on the final episode of Celine Understood. The show was produced by Crystal Duhaim and Zoe Tennant, with showrunner Imogen Burchard. Sound design by Crystal Duhaim with sound engineering by Julia Whitman. Roshni Nair is our coordinating producer. Executive producers are Chris oak and Nick McCabe. Blokos 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, CCTV One 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.

[Ian Urbina]

For more CBC Podcasts, go to CBC CA Podcasts.