Montreal is fast becoming a Franglais city in which most of its young people are proficient in both French and English – and their music is a reflection of that

For most people, the term “Franglais” will be most closely associated with that confused phrasebook mélange of English and French often used by lazy tourists on holiday. But for a select group of bilingual rappers in Montreal, Canada, Franglais is far more than a fumbled effort at ordering coq au vin.

Spearheaded by Dead Obies, Alaclair Ensemble and Loud Lary Ajust the groups have opted to rap in a balanced mix of the two languages, switching seemingly at random, mid-verse. Unlike tourist Franglais, these rappers don’t do this because they lack the French or English for a specific word, but because active bilingualism – their Franglais – is an everyday reality. As Quebec’s economic capital, Montreal is fast becoming a Franglais city in which most young people are proficient in both languages, and their music is a reflection of that.

Some of Quebec’s more conservative media figures have kicked up a fuss about such an affront to the “purity” of standard French, with Le Devoir journalist Christian Rioux going as far as to criticise these groups’ “suicidal fondness for English” last year. Mathieu Bock-Côté, writing in Le Journal de Montréal, also raised concerns about a “creolisation of Québécois culture”, stating that these artists were symbolic of a newly “colonised society”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dead Obies.

Such views are backwards and irrelevant in the eyes of Jean-François Ruel (AKA Yes McCan), one of the five MCs in Dead Obies, the self-described “post-rap” group who have taken the heat of the vitriol. Given the American origins of hip-hop culture, McCan says, it was only natural that they would merge the two languages they speak fluently as one.

“The codes of hip-hop were set within a certain set of English words and expressions,” he explains. “There’s that, and there’s also the African American vernacular that’s intrinsic to hip-hop. If I was doing samba, I guess I would use Portuguese words with French, so it’s a matter of getting some authenticity from the original masters, as well as blending in my own cultural baggage.”

Most people who had taken a stand against their music belonged to a certain generation who knew nothing about hip-hop, as “it still hadn’t arrived in their kingdom”, McCan adds. “They didn’t know what it was. They associated it more with globalization and the slow loss of cultural heritage, a fading out of a culture and identity, but they shouldn’t have.”

Although it only really began to make headlines last year, Franglais rap actually has its roots in late-90s Montreal. Before this, the city’s earliest rappers had used either mainly English or mainly French, and it wasn’t until 1999 that the first unmistakably Franglais record was released. This was Sans Pression’s 514-50 Dans Mon Réseau (track seven of which was the appropriately titled Franglais Street Slang). Later releases from artists such as Muzion and Yvon Krevé would turn Franglais rap into a trend for the first time and provide vital inspiration for today’s batch of bilingual artists.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Alaclair Ensemble.

At the very beginning, explains McCan, “you had all these Haitian and black artists who didn’t care about the French or English debate at all because to them it’s all exploiters and looters, so they’re taking a bit of English, a bit of French and they’re throwing Creole in the mix, so that’s how it was coded at the start with Sans Pression, Yvon Krevé and Muzion. You had that kind of ambivalence where they were not taking either side.”

With a Franglais rebirth of sorts occurring around 2010, McCan says it was only natural that groups like Dead Obies and Loud Lary Ajust would follow their predecessors and draw upon the resources of both languages. “They were just taking whatever word flowed within the context of the song. And now, the people who are doing Franglais rap now are merely following that,” adds McCan.

For a genre in which fun and sophisticated wordplay are so important, having the sounds, rhythms and vocabulary of two languages at your disposal caters for enormous lyrical creativity, especially in terms of rhymes. “We match rhymes from different languages all the time,” says Loud, one of the two MCs in Loud Lary Ajust. “There are only so many rhymes in one language and everyone uses them all the time, but when you make words from different languages rhyme, those are probably being used for the very first time.”

Both Dead Obies and Loud Lary Ajust are set to turn in new releases this autumn, and both are adamant that multilingualism is becoming the norm, not just in Quebec but right across the world. Franglais rap, they emphasise, is simply a reflection of the natural linguistic evolution of Quebec French and the global cultural encroachment of English.

Considering the future of the genre, Obies’ McCan reckons a third major wave of Franglais rappers will crop up sooner than the last. “After the second album, it’ll be like five years since we’ve been on the scene,” he says. “And I guess after that tour, the kids who started listening to us back then will have grown older and will maybe start rapping in Franglais. I can foresee that happening within just a couple of years. There’ll be lots of them.”