The Rabble and the Haunted were Montreal’s two coolest anglo bands in the second half of the 1960s. If the Haunted were closer to the raw, blues-based sound and bad-boy image of the Yardbirds or the early Rolling Stones, the Rabble were farther out in terms of both music and look. They were, more or less, our answer to Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention. Oddly enough, though, frontman Pimm and lead guitarist Mike Harris wrote some of the catchiest hooks this side of the Beatles.
[...] “A lot of the stuff that happened here was encapsulated here,” Pimm said. “We heard about the Staccatos from Ottawa and the Ugly Ducklings from Toronto, but they never heard of us. It just didn’t work both ways. Even so, Quebec was a neat place to be. The audiences were great and they welcomed original stuff. They were excited about the music. But you were kind of trapped in Quebec unless you really started to travel around and get promoted somewhere else. A lot of memories stayed in Quebec. Good memories. A lot of great bands came out of here, but it just didn’t really have a chance somehow.
“Part of it may be that English Canada wasn’t that interested in this province,” Pimm continued. “Maybe they were a little lost about the two languages going on.” Although the Rabble recorded in English, he pointed out, much of the group’s audience was francophone.
[...] “Way before the Rabble, I wanted to be a professional musician. I didn’t give a damn about stardom or notoriety or being invited to a party because I was in this band. So I moved to Toronto, where there were a lot more choices at the time.”
Just tripped across an excellent Fagstein blog post from last month breaking down the heightened response to Epic Meal Time’s appearance on Tout le monde en parle (scroll to bottom for video of the show). The West Islanders conducted the interview in English and response was swift. Even though this is an old story, we thought the Fagstein analysis was worth sharing. Click the title for the complete article, which includes highlights of the flood of Twitter response, video responses from Youtube, and discussion of education policies, anglo guilt, entre autres… Definitely worth a read.
I put in a request with Epic Meal Time’s agent (yes, they have one), but have heard nothing yet. For the sake of argument, let’s assume they’re like me and many others from the West Island and that they went to English public school. Let’s also assume they know some French but not enough to have an in-depth conversation.
It makes me wonder if I would have been judged so harshly if I had been on the Plateau of this show, and with a mix of nervousness and a desire to be clear I had asked that the interview be done in English. My conversational French is okay, but my grammar is awful. There’s a reason I don’t blog in French often. I have too much respect for the language to expose people to my destruction of it.
That in mind, it seems perfectly understandable that two guys from the West Island who make Internet videos aren’t the best French speakers and prefer to express themselves in the language they’re most comfortable in.
And yet, it bothered me.
It wasn’t so much that they were talking in English. But they had earpieces during the interview, which means they needed the questions to be translated. That’s kind of a depressing statement about the state of French-language education in English schools in Quebec (again, assuming that’s how they were educated).
But even that didn’t bug me as much as this: They didn’t even try.
One thing I’ve learned about Quebec’s French language protectors (at least the reasonable moderate ones) is that they appreciate effort. It’s the thought that counts.
When Brian Gionta introduced the Canadiens at the beginning of the season in quite possibly the most atrocious French anyone has ever heard this side of an Alberta public school, the fans appreciated it. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t pronounce the numbers right or that he called Maxim Lapierre “Maxim Laperrière”. He acknowledged that French is the language spoken here and he wanted to make an effort, if only a tiny one, to speak to them in that language.
But Morenstein and Toth couldn’t manage even a “bonsoir” or a “merci”, perhaps because they were playing their tough-guy characters, or perhaps because they just didn’t care and had no respect for the show, the host or the audience they were addressing.
Epic Meal Time's Harley Morenstein and Sterling Toth on Tout le monde en parle (photo: Karine Dufour for Radio-Canada)
The language of poutine
It’s funny because Epic Meal Time has probably been one of the best ambassadors for Quebec cuisine of the past decade. Just two days before taping TLMEP, they released this video of them heading into the woods and preparing a meal that included tourtière and tire sur la neige (words that Morenstein utters in slightly accented but perfectly understandable French).
One of their earliest videos was of the Angry French Canadian, a “meal” that included poutine, steamés and maple syrup on a baguette.
THE BEND, a film written and directed by Jennifer Kierans, a graduate of Concordia’s MA program in creative writing, will open in Canadian theatres tomorrow, including the AMC Forum.
Jennifer Kierans is a screenwriter, director and producer whose short films have screened at festivals around the world including the Critic’s Week section at Cannes. THE BEND marks her feature film debut. Jennifer now lives in New York City where she is developing her next project entitled BLUE MOVIE.
CONTACT INFORMATION
3401 St-Antoine West, Montreal (Quebec) H3Z 1X1 Telephone: (514) 931-6180 x 2657 Fax: (514) 939-2034 www.filmoption.com
It is a parody shot in the style of a movie trailer — a comment on the trend of “gritty” remakes of popular franchises — and portrays a darker side of the fictional high school in the comic books. It touches on drug use, teen pregnancy, jealously, sexual assault, violence and homophobia.
