Calamine | Lesbian woke on rhyme

She calls herself Calamine, but she wants her rap to sting. Half nerdhalf geek rhymes that strike, she scratches the sores that she observes in her neighborhood, Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, and hopes to shock the sores.

Calamine has a rebellious verb and a humor just enough to shock shy ears on his new album, entitled Personal decline. There are those who are offended by the language used by this rapper in her songs – a French that sounds, peppered with English expressions – but they have certainly never sat down with her to discuss nor her turns of phrase. sentences or readings that help him shape a vision of the world.

The morning of our meeting, the 32-year-old had in hand her latest purchase: an essay published by Écosociété asking whether ecosabotage “would benefit from being part of the tactical arsenal of climate activists”. Anti-capitalist in a world dominated by finance, lesbian in a straight world, artist in a society driven by numbers, Calamine is not the girlfriend of the status quo, let’s say.

“My path was not traced just with musical inspirations,” said the rapper quoted last year at ADISQ for her album Lesbian woke on autotune.

From brush to pen

Calamine grew up in Quebec and didn’t always dream of holding a microphone on stage. She has loved rap since she was very young – Eminem, Snoop Dogg, 50 Cent – ​​but took a while to project herself into the role of MC. As a queer woman, she didn’t really fit the image that rap gave her.

“It played a role in the fact that I didn’t imagine myself doing it,” she agrees. In Quebec, there was Jenny Salgado (in Muzion), but otherwise it was a long time before there was a Sarahmée. The fact that it’s a world of heightened masculinity means that it didn’t cross my mind to do it when I was younger. »

Before handling the rhyme, she rather held the brush. “I wanted to be a painter,” says Calamine, who studied visual arts. “After my baccalaureate, I hit a wall,” she remembers. I found painting so lonely. I didn’t want to be alone all the time and I felt like that didn’t allow me to get to the end of what I wanted to say. » She got rid of her workshop and took over a music room.

Taken back ? Yes, because before devoting himself to rap, Calamine had already dabbled in music. “I was doing more blues, folk, bluegrass. I play a lot of guitar. Before that, I had played more in metal bands,” she says. Seeing my taken aback look, she clarified: “Me, I love the music, the composition. It doesn’t matter which direction it takes. »

The words that ring

His pleasure – his drug, one is tempted to say – is to fine-tune his sentences, to find the rhymes that make sense. “I’m really picky. Each line must have a reason for being. There are no stop-gap rhymes (in my lyrics),” says Calamine, who describes herself as geek in terms of writing. We have proof of this, if proof were needed, when she recounts winning a writing competition as a teenager with a poem on ecology written in… alexandrines.

His art of speech is also an art of self-disclosure and self-affirmation. With authenticity being a cardinal value in rap, it was always clear to her that her songs would speak to her anti-capitalist and feminist ideas, as well as her homosexuality. What she does by talking so much about her sex games with her girlfriend (Oh dear) that by criticizing the gentrification of his neighborhood, Hochelaga-Maisonneuve (Gentrifornication).

“Rap is music of the people. Community music to talk about your community, she emphasizes. It was obvious. » But when you’re a queer person, something as common as writing a love song inevitably becomes political, she adds.

“I’ve spent my life being able to project myself in films with straight relationships and in songs with straight romantic relationships,” Calamine says. It seems like I want to take on the challenge of writing a lesbian love tune that everyone could relate to. »

To be and to pasture

Calamine is well aware that she says things in her songs that can be disturbing. That what she is can be disturbing. That his way of expressing himself in his songs can be disturbing. She also points it out with humor at the opening of her album Personal decline where she juxtaposes comments from media commentators who are ironic about her or make fun of “wokism”.

“I still find myself relaxed in my comments,” she explains. I know that there are reactions like that because political discourse is ultrapoliticized at the moment, but I think that the social climate and the climatic situation require that we stop being temperate. »

Calamine and her colleague Kèthe Magané, with whom she writes her music, await the detractors. “We tell ourselves that if we don’t shock anyone, it’s because we’re only preaching to the converted,” she explains. Calamine doesn’t yet know if her shoulders are as strong as those of Safia Nolin who “ate a flood of junk”, but she doesn’t shy away: she’s there to “get things going”.

Calamine is in concert in Rimouski this Saturday and on tour in Quebec.

Check Calamine tour dates