The Dead Obies Are the Wildest French-Canadian Punk Rap Group from Montreal You’ll Hear This Week

Photos by Ellie Pritts

It’s a Saturday afternoon in Montreal, and there are a bunch of dudes running around on stage without their shirts on. No, this isn’t some weird indie folk rock band experiment that Win Butler decided to try because he’s over the emotions he felt while writing Arcade Fire lyrics in the coffee shop down the street. Instead, this is the Dead Obies, a group of six French-Canadian dudes who consider themselves punk rappers and are here to do their best to scare the shit out of you.

Performing for the music festival M for Montreal this past November, I witnessed these dudes—whom I’d never heard of before—rip off their shirts and jump all over each other on stage. Then they spit at the audience. Then they spit on each other. Then they smashed some bottles of beer. The mayhem leaked over into the few hundred person crowd—nearly every teenager there was wearing streetwear and rapping along to every lyric. It was awesome.

Being one of the weeklong festival’s most captivating performances, I knew I had to talk to them. Backstage at one of the many clubs of Montreal, I chatted over Moosehead beers with all six members—who go by the MC names Yes Mccan, Snail Kid, 20some, RCA, VNCE, and O.G. BEAR, and range in ages 26 to 31—about where they came from, what their goals are, the absolutely crazy video they have for their song “Tony Hawk,” and the complicated culture of Quebec. We also talked about Drake.

Below, you can also stream their second mixtape, Collation Vol.2 - Limon Verde : La Experiencia.

Noisey: That was pretty dope, considering it’s 4:30 in the afternoon.
Yes Mccan: Tonight was like a sprint, bang bang bang.

What’s the rap scene like in Montreal?
Snail Kid: Everything is divided in two because of the French and English thing, and you have really good cats on the English half that are gonna promote towards Toronto mostly, and you go to the world via Toronto, and there’s the French scene that’s super local and super exciting. All those new bands popping off with the new style of rhyming, the new beats. Because of internet, we’re really connected with what’s happening as we speak. Underachievers might interest someone in Montreal where as like 20 years ago when Nas hit the streets, you didn’t have it in Quebec yet, it took like five years before people knew about him. So right now, I think everybody is just leveling, it’s what happening internationally.

Do you guys associate with like French or English, do you associate with either side?
Yes Mccan:Well that’s our thing, we want to just do both. There’s no side, it’s divided right now in Quebec. I’d say we don’t pick sides when we do it but people maybe have a tendency of putting us in the French category. Mainly in French like grammar but with a lot of English influence like verbs. My sentence is in French but verbs or nouns could easily be replaced by English words. It’s the little words that stay true to my reflexes.

20some:What’s crazy is just this interplay between languages, give it first a really unique perspective in the world because it’s not happening anywhere, it’s real creative with like making rhyme like I don’t know, if you say something in French, you work with the syllables that’s super creative because you cannot read the rhyme. When you read it, it doesn’t rhyme, but when you swag it out, it just meshes together. You have a bigger vocabulary, and we like to make a French word rhyme with an English word, to us it’s funny. It’s even better.

In Quebec everybody speaks French, and they think we’re putting English in our songs for marketing. But if you live here you know that you’re surrounded by English in TV and internet. If you only read stuff in French that comes from internet you’re restraining. English is part of us but we keep the French through because we’re true to where we’re from.

How is the clash of English and French reflected in your music?
20some: There is levels. There is a multi-faceted thing. In the music, I would say there is a big background in the city of indie rock, like in the early 2000s, and you know all the bands that popped up. The big thing is the ears are already tuned to indie music, indie electronic so there’s probably fusion between all types of stuff. Like we have a punk rock song, it’s a big rock and roll city so we melt, it’s not straightforward either trap or boom bap, or what you might call it. It’s not straightforward that music, it meshes a lot of influences. As far as language goes too, it’s like some people in the French community, we get a lot of heat for mixing together because there’s this big history in Quebec of social rights and rights of Francophones and fighting for independence and stuff like that so it’s still really close to us. The last referendum was in 95, so I was alive—I was five-years-old, so there is a big scar in the heart of the Francophones, and when you have people who mix stuff together. They’re afraid that we’re gonna lose our identity. Our cultural heritage, but that’s what the problem is politically too right now. There’s a lot of non-verbalized racism going on because of all those things so it fuels into our music in terms of rage. We just want to kick fuckers in the guts.

What are you trying to accomplish as a rap group?
20some:Personally, one of my biggest goals or something I dreamt of and I never thought I would be able to do was to drop an album which I was proud of and I really like the album. I really like it and I’m really proud of what we did, and just this for me is the first step for real and then I didn’t even think of what I was doing, wanting to do. It’s been one week that the album dropped and the critics and stuff is so amazing.

Snail Kid:It’s really critically acclaimed and hip-hop is never critically acclaimed in Quebec, people just don’t get it.

Yeah, when I think Montreal, I don’t really think hip-hop. I think Win Butler and Arcade Fire and coffee shops.
Yes Mccan: Be on the lookout for upcoming stuff. Our goals are—I guess it’s cliché but if we continue working like we’ve been the two last years from zero to free Moosehead. I just want to travel doing music. All free, traveling.

20some: The greatest goal is for people to relate to music. Even if it’s like a thousand people, even if it’s one guy, if they relate. We’re six, so at least six, one for each of us, hopefully a girl, if someone can listen to album on his way to work on a shitty day and it can put them in the mood and make them feel great like when I listen to Kayne or Jay Z and I feel like a boss walking on the street. If they can feel that listening to my shitty voice then I made it.

What do you guys think about Drake?
20some:Personally I don’t even care about him. Personally he didn’t even influence me at all.

Yes Mccan: I think it’s always gonna be an American thing but if you wanna stay true, stand out, you gotta pay homage to the builders of that type of music, you gotta really understand, do your homework to understand the swag of the music and the spirit and the aesthetic but you gotta put some of yourself, some of your culture and that’s why some French rap, it doesn’t pop. To me, Drake is American. Like Canada culture, what is Canadian culture? We only know Quebec. For real, Canada to me is like little America.

O.G. BEAR: A little American.

Yes Mccan:I didn’t know he was from Toronto, for real. You have to put some of your own, don’t try to copy what’s been made in New York because it’ll show that I’m not from New York. I grew up listening to crack music but I don’t do crack. I’m not gonna rap about crack but we’re influenced.

20some:That’s why we’re over here calling our stuff post rap, because we don’t say we do rap. I’m not saying I’m a rapper, but I’m saying this is my starting point. This is rap and I’m going somewhere, exploring. I’m having fun, I’m using this as a starting point for my art, but if I meet, like, Redman, I’m not really a rapper. I’m like, you got to put some of yourself but what is great is that the internet has been making us able to really connect and be like relevant culturally and know what’s happening everywhere in the world.

Eric Sundermann took four years of French in high school. He's on Twitter — @ericsundy

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