Monday 23 August 2010
Polaris ’10 Shortlist: Radio Radio Belmundo Regal
I don’t know what the hell I’m going to write about today. There I said it, okay? I’m ill-equipped to comment on hip hop on the best of days, but add the fact that it’s supposed to be a comedy album in a language I don’t fully understand and I’m left scratching my head and feeling like a complete idiot.
Radio Radio‘s Belmundo Regal is a whole lot of fun, and it’s made my workouts at the gym bearable these past few weeks. I’ve actually been looking forward to doing hammer curls to “Cargué dans ma chaise” and “Dekshoo”, but I have been dreading having to sit down and write this post. Why do I feel like I’m on the outside of their world, looking in through a steamed up window, without the secret password to get passed the front door? I want to know what Radio Radio are rapping about, because it sounds smart and fun and I want to be in on the joke. Why are they taking the piss out of Kenny G? Did they really meet a guy who called himself Belmundo on Oak Island and then set about creating a concept album based on that meeting? What exactly about said record got it a spot on the Polaris shortlist? Why does my head spin every time I listen to this album?
Jacques Alphonse Doucet, Alexandre Arthur Bilodeau and Gabriel Louis Bernard Malenfant rap in the chiac dialect that’s part Acadian French and part English. While I don’t understand the language itself, I get the concept of it. I am the son of Italian immigrants, who moved to Canada in the 1950s. My parents and all their friends kept their language alive by practicing it as much as they possibly could. Of course, they had to deal with the fact that Italians from neighbouring villages often spoke different dialects. It was as if each town had their own version of the language, so they started to blend and share dialects, in effect creating a new version of Italian of their own. They were in a new world too, and new words and influences slowly crept into their lexicon. What emerged is a true bastardized version of Italian, that blended dialects and English to create what many in their homeland would come to regard as a desecration of their mother tongue. While our relatives in Italy referred to automobiles as “machinas” me and my Italian-Canadian friends were taught to take the English word “car and add a long /o/ sound at the end and make it plural. Automobiles were “car-os”, and apparently we didn’t drive them on a “via,” we drove them on a “street-o”. How stupid-o did we sound?
About as silly as “Avec mei penny loafer, ou avec mei dehshoo,” sounds is my guess. When I reviewed Karkwa’s Les Chemins de Verre earlier this summer, I said that you didn’t need to understand the french language lyrics to appreciate the album. I thought that Belmundo Regal would be a similar story, but I’m totally torn. The marriage of their version of Acadian French and rap makes perfect sense to me, as both the language and musical genre developed from roots in a traditional culture that was transported to another world that mutated and developed a distinct style. So on the surface, you don’t really need to know what they’re rapping about to appreciate the music. But if you want to get any deeper into it, you have to have rely on the included glossary of terms to make any sense of what’s going on. Is that the joke? Are we the listeners the punch line? Am I on Candid Camera?
I don’t know what the hell I’m writing about today, that’s sure bloody sure, but here’s what I do know: a) Belmundo Regal has a great celebratory feel to it and I can appreciate it’s musical vibrancy; b) I don’t know what the hell they’re rapping about most of the time and it’s as annoying as all get out; and c) It’s getting to the point where I’m beyond caring if I “get” this record or not. Every time I listen to this record my opinion of it changes. At first, I thought it was crap. I listened some more and caught myself singing along with it. But then I start to wonder if I’m missing something lyrically, some great big in-joke that would explain it all if I only could understand it. I’ve been flip-flopping like a suffocating fish, trying to decide if it’s terribly brilliant or brilliantly terrible. It’s come to the point where I can’t listen to this record anymore, because every time I do I end up rewriting this post.
Polaris is about awarding the album that’s achieved the highest level of artistic merit this year. So the ultimate question has to be: is Belmundo Regal the album that best fits that description? In my opinion, no it isn’t. If, on September 20, the answer ends up being yes, then I think it just might be time I got my stupid-o ass-o off the internet-a and try my hand at selling “dekshoos” instead.
Belmundo Regal was released on March 4, 2010 on Bonsound Records.
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