Perfect Blend: Haiti’s Influence on Québec’s Rap Community

I am the first child of Haitian parents to be born on Canadian soil. My grandparents moved to Montréal in 1973 with my mom and her siblings, seeking a better life. Back home, the Duvalier dictatorship was threatening to kill my grandfather. It’s a story that a lot of the Haitians in Montréal share.

Around the same time, my mom was always sent to Brooklyn for the summer to see her family and learn English. There was a big Caribbean community in Flatbush, and her brother was bringing back bootleg cassette tapes and VHS of rap music from the US. That’s the way a lot of Haitians and Anglo-Caribbean’s were sharing music, because at the time there was no such thing as rap on the radio in Québec. Rap was considered to be a joke, not an art form. One of the first rap songs to come out of the area to reflect that was 1985’s “Ça Rend Rap,” by the comedy group Rock et Belles Oreilles. They rap about Montréal’s nightlife in a French-Canadian take that sounds similar to Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message” – it was clearly a response to what was happening musically in the US.

At first, rappers in Montréal were spitting their rhymes in English. But when French rap artists like MC Solaar, IAM and Fonky Family came out, they started to rap in French, eventually giving way to the work of artists like MRF and KCLMNOP. It was Dubmatique, with the album La Force de Comprendre, who became the first local rap group to have commercial success on both French and English radio in Québec.

Dubmatique were still using European French language codes, while in the streets people spoke “joual,” a Québécois patois. The amount of immigrants coming to Montréal was growing every year, with North Africans, Caribbeans, Hispanics, Asians and even West Europeans coming to make Montréal great in their own way, and something was about to happen to language and rap music in Québec. In the 1990s, when Jean-Bertrand Aristide was ruling a corrupt regime in Haiti, it inspired a third wave of Haitian immigration to Montréal, the biggest since the 1970s. They flocked to the areas where I grew up: Montréal-Nord, Riviére-des-Praires, Villeray and St-Michel on the island’s eastern side, mixing with native Québecer, Hispanics and Italians.

Through the end of the 1990s and beginning of the 2000s, rap groups like Rainmen, Buzzy Bwoy, BlackSunz, Yvon Krevé and Muzion were beginning to make their own noise, inspired by the rush of immigrants, that utilized their native language codes, speaking directly to their communities while making themselves heard by the mainstream. It was a demonstration of the distinct identity of multi-ethnic youth in Montréal, participating in a new form of social discourse by embracing pluralism through rap music. Here are seven additional building blocks that tell the story of “Franglish rap” in Montréal.

Bilingual Releases

Released in both French and English, Rainmen’s Armageddon came out in 1998 on Les Productions Radisson. Representing people on the East Side of Montréal, in neighborhoods like Anjou, Riviéres-des-Prairies and Point-Aux Trembles, the dual-language strategy was a conscious way of reaching both markets, and it worked – “Pas d’chilling” was an instant classic of Haitian rap here in the city.

The Fugees of St-Michel

Muzion were a trio of Haitians telling stories of new immigrants from the upper class of Haiti. The came to Québec to have a better life, only to struggle to get by in the poor neighbourhoods of St-Michel. There’s a similarity to the Fugees in Wyclef Jean and Pras’ Haitian heritage – the Haitian diasporas in Montréal and New York weren’t so different, although there was a different socio-linguistic background. Muzion’s “La Vi Ti-Neg” became an anthem in practically all of Montréal’s distinct communities, even though they were specifically rapping about black pride through the eyes of the Haitian diaspora. It was a reflection of pride in their Haitian heritage – few people know that Haiti was the first colony to abolish slavery, with Toussaint l’Ouverture declaring Haiti as the land of the free black man.

The Godfather of Franglish Rap

Sans Pression was the most important rapper in Québec, embracing his hybrid identity to create a new form of expression beyond rap that has since become the common language of Franglish street slang. Pression was born in upstate New York but was of Congolese descent, and he grew up in Longueuil, a poor neighbourhood in Québec where Haitians and Québecer lived in harmony. The title of his classic album, 514-50 Dans Mon Réseau, combines both Montréal’s and the North & South Shore’s regional codes (514 and 450), shouting out his own hood.

At the time, rappers were covering subjects like poverty, racism and rejection using their own language codes, a method of integrating French-Canadian culture while still retaining a reminder of hybrid origins. In just one bar, Sans Pression could use more than four language codes, and research by Dr. Mela Sarkar of McGill University has shown up to six language codes total in Pression’s rap. He was a master of code-switching – talking in French-Canadian patois, Haitian Creole and Jamaican patois, as well as English, European French and even Spanish. It was this sort of linguistic mix-and-match that transformed rap in Montréal.

ADISQ Interrupted

Despite San Pression’s strides forward, Québec’s star system didn’t fully accept hip-hop. That began to change in October 2002, when the rap group 83 interrupted the ADISQ ceremonies (the Québec version of the Grammys) to tell the public and the music industry that their culture deserved more air time. Funnily enough, the host of that show was a member of RBO, the group that made “Ça Rend Rap” almost twenty years before.

Did respect for hip-hop in Québec improve after this interruption? A bit, but we’re still a step back when compared to the industry in the US and France. There is still no hip-hop radio station in Québec, after twenty years of fighting for such representation.

The Voice of Multiculturalism

In 2004, Nomadic Massive changed everything for Franglish rap. A multi-ethnic group of boys and girls from Trinidad, Haiti, Algeria, Brazil, Argentina, Québec and Iraq, the crew had a vibrant full band and were spitting verses in languages from all of their motherlands. Most members of Nomadic Massive are not only hip-hop pioneers but activists in their community, as well. With “Any Sound,” they gave a voice to all the kids in Côte-des-Neiges, Parc Extension, Little Burgundy and Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, kids who had a much more complex socio-linguistic reality.

Changing the Game, One Galette at a Time

In 2010, Alaclair Ensemble came out with $4.99, one of the most important albums in the history of Québécois rap. The project came about when a few rappers met in a rideshare between Québec and Montréal. They had all had projects in the past like Movézebe, Accrophone or as solo artists, and they offered a new music style while also changing the way that music was marketed in Québec. They gave away eight albums for free online in the last five years, all while operating in a specific semantic field that included stories of Robert Nelson and the Lower-Canada. In their new song “Sauce Pois,” Alaclair pay homage to a classic Haitian dish: rice and beans sauce. This piece and many others show how Haitians have influenced Québec culture as thoroughly as the culture has influenced their language.

WordUP!

WordUP! was the first battle rap league to be conducted in French and was created by Filligran from K6A, a Montréal-based graffiti and rap collective. From these battles came Dead Obies, six rappers who grew up in South Shore of Montréal. (They call it “$ud $ale,” or “Dirty South.”)

Almost like the little brothers of K6A and Alaclair Ensemble, Dead Obies had a totally different vision of rap than what had come before, and did things like building a conceptual show around “La société du spectacle” by Guy Debord. At one point in their career, they even had to give back a Québec government grant after the release of their second album Gesamtkunstwerk – after counting every word, the grant-makers came to the conclusion that the album was too bilingual and there wasn’t enough French. Recently, Dead Obies have been all over the French-Canadian media to talk about Franglish rap, yet another step forward in a new social discourse embracing the hybrid identities of Montréalers.