Born to be Quiet

Marine Johannès is the Clairo of Women’s Basketball

We shouldn’t have seen it. No one should have. But in 2017, Claire Cottrill quietly uploaded a song called “Pretty Girl” to YouTube. It was one of the first songs she released under the name Clairo, and the video gained nearly 15 million views within the first year.

In the video, recorded on her computer webcam, Cottrill wears wired earbuds and lip-syncs the lyrics to “Pretty Girl” while sitting on her bed in front of a map of France. At the time, Clairo was 19. During the same year, somewhere on that map, French basketball player Marine Johannès went undrafted in the WNBA draft.

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If you’re unfamiliar with Johannès, she’s been one of my highlights of the 2024 Olympic Games. As a member of the French national team, the Lisieux native has helped put her home country in gold medal contention with her unconventional playing style that has been described as “basketball ballet.”

Johannès’ highlights often include one-legged jumpers, no-look passes, and dribble moves that leave defenders reaching for ghosts. In France’s quarterfinal win against Germany, Johannés led the game in scoring with 24 points and five threes—all while coming off the bench.

That’s the thing. Johannès might be the best playmaker on the French national team, and she doesn’t even start. For the San Francisco Chronicle, writer Bruce Jenkins described Johannès, the “French Steph Curry,” as the “best bench player in sports.” He even calls her “one of the world’s greatest entertainers.”

Source: @MJohannesOOC (Twitter/X)

Johannès cemented herself as a human highlight reel, even before this year’s Olympics. But I didn’t realize she was competing until I started seeing clips of her throwing one of the smoothest no-look passes I’ve ever seen in France’s game against Nigeria.

She flies under the radar. “While Johannès is flashy on the court, she is quite shy off the court,” wrote AP’s Doug Feinberg. “She’s from a town of less than 750 people in France’s northern region.”

It can be easy to forget Johannès, especially when her WNBA teammates on the New York Liberty are all-stars Breanna Stewart, Sabrina Ionescu, Jonquel Jones, Courtney Vandersloot, and Betnijah Laney-Hamilton.

But like Clairo, Johannès still finds a way to stand out among her superstar contemporaries. Her understated flair is charming, possessing a certain allure, leading some to refer to her as “Wizard” or “La Magicienne.”

In a musical landscape dominated by Sabrina Carpenter’s glossiness, Chappell Roan’s theatrics, and the brashness of Charli xcx’s BRAT, Clairo opted for subtlety. Her latest album Charm is soft and enticing. As Marissa Lorusso wrote for Pitchfork, “Charm emits a palpable warmth.”

Lorusso continued, “Clairo’s vocals remain, by and large, hushed, but thanks to the golden-hued production, her voice comes across more like a murmur in a crush’s ear than a sheepish mumble on a first date.”

My favorite Charm song “Juna” casts a spell. From the moment the melody begins, the groove embodies characteristics that The New Yorker’s Amanda Petrusich used when describing Clairo’s “Pretty Girl” video: “unpretentious, easy, and magnetic.”

“Juna” is sexy. Not an in-your-face sexiness, but a suggestion of sensuality. I wouldn’t even say it’s as direct or calculated as locking eyes with someone at a bar; it’s more like being captivated by their aura.

“You make me wanna go buy a new dress,” Clairo sings, “You make me wanna slip off a new dress.”

Although Clairo sings these words like a whisper, she utters them with ease and confidence. They’re playful without feeling childish.

“I’ve never been a yeller,” Clairo said on the Bandsplain podcast. “I’ve never been someone who raises my voice.” She continued, “I think I’m learning that I’m just born to be quiet.”

Clairo now lives a slow, domestic life in upstate New York, probably not too different from Marine Johannès’ rural retreat of Bonnebosq, the village she calls home. “It’s where her creativity recharges,” The Athletic’s Ben Pickman wrote of the French phenom.

But Clairo and Johannès learned to shape their magic in Brooklyn, the New York City borough that always raises its voice. Clairo moved to Bushwick after her freshman year at Syracuse University and still has an apartment in the city. While living in Brooklyn, she released her debut album Immunity, which just celebrated five years.

Johannès joined the Liberty in 2019 before they played at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center. And since then, she has only become more of a fan favorite, helping lead New York past the Las Vegas Aces to win last year’s WNBA Commissioner’s Cup. Johannès led all scorers with 17 points and five 3-pointers.

Johannès isn’t one to celebrate big after a jaw-dropping play, and that’s okay. Her appeal isn’t in how loud she is; it’s in her quirks and creativity. Clairo is similar. According to Lorusso, it’s the “quotidian details and the tiny imperfections that make Clairo’s music uniquely alluring.”

Their charm also emanates from how temporary it all feels. As France prepares to play the United States in tomorrow’s gold medal game, it dawns on me that I likely won’t be able to watch Johannès play again until she rejoins the Liberty next season.

Charm is Clairo’s first album in three years. And before that, she hadn’t dropped a music video in six years until she recently released the visuals for “Juna.” As Clairo’s eras tend to be, this one feels fleeting.

“There’s something that’s left to be desired, which really resonates with me,” Clairo told Remi Wolf in a conversation for Interview Magazine. She continued, “I want the audience to understand that, with me, it’s never going to fully be given.”

And I guess that’s what keeps us coming back. The chance that we might be dazzled again. That we might find ourselves swept up in the magic once more. That an indie darling and French shooting guard might be two sides of the same coin, inviting us to come play.

At least, until the final buzzer sounds. Or the record stops spinning. And the countryside beckons them home.