GOING AGAINST THE GRAIN
Rapper Koriass grabs the attention of Quebec’s entertainment world with a multi-faceted message,
MONTREAL— He is a white boy from the suburbs who speaks about poverty in the hood; an avowed Quebec sovereigntist who sprinkles his rhymes with English; a rapper who has declared himself a feminist.
Koriass is large. He contains multitudes. But the seeming contradictions are piling up into a formidable soapbox from which the 32year-old is preaching his message and grabbing the attention of a Quebec media and entertainment world that’s been focused elsewhere or is arriving late.
“Hip hop is a movement that goes against the grain,” Koriass, a.k.a. Emmanuel Dubois, says. “Part of what I do is go against the established norms to try and speak about my values and convictions.”
He formed his first group as a teenager in 2001and worked his way up the ladder, gaining attention in the world of battle rap and turning that into a record deal. Love Suprême, his most recent album, was released last month.
Acclaim for Koriass has been building since 2012 when he received two Félix nominations for Quebec Hip-Hop Album and Songwriter of the Year in the annual gala hosted by the province’s professional music association, ADISQ.
In 2014, he finally took the industry’s most coveted prize when Rue des Saules won Hip-Hop Album of the Year. But it was the confessional content of his lyrics, which circled back to the depression Koriass had recently come through, that set the work apart.
Rue des Saules also contained the seed of the social conscience that is now coming to define Koriass. His song “Montréal-Nord” may be the first rap song in any language to make a rhyming couplet out of the term “hereditary poverty.” The song is an indictment of the untreated social problems passed down over generations in the neighbourhood where Koriass was born and where his mother’s side of the family has its roots.
“I have one foot in MontrealNord,” he says, while admitting the rest of him is firmly rooted in the suburban bliss of Saint-Eustache, which is 30 kilometres and a world away from Koriass’s hard-scrabble birthplace.
A softer-than-stereotypical upbringing has done little to detract from his hip-hop credibility, in part because he is the first to laugh at himself. That is most notable in the 2011 track “St-Eustache,” which lays bare that he’s a musician, not a thug or a gangster.
The song was awarded the 2012 French-language ECHO songwriting prize by SOCAN, the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada.
Despite that recognition as a francophone songwriter, Koriass has been sucked into the debate over the fate of the French language and what some consider an obligation on francophone artists not to corrupt their lyrics with English.
He rejects the argument of French-language fatalists, who won’t find any pleasure in his latest album. It contains lines like: “J’ai jamais settle de sell out pour get du steady cash.”
It is blatant franglais as only a Quebec artist could pull off, and it comes naturally to Koriass, a francophone who grew up on American rap. As a young rapper, he said he bounced between that North American style and French rap, delivered with a proper accent.
He found his place after hearing a Quebec hip-hop artist for the first time rapping in the provincial joual.
The ability to speak to a Quebec audience in its own language has also led Koriass to his most recent undertaking: a provincial tour to talk to high school students about sexual consent.
The initiative was borne out of the sexual assault accusations against former CBC radio host Jian Ghomeshi and the social media movement #BeenRapedNeverReported.
Last summer, Koriass penned an article about a female friend who was raped at 17 by a man a decade older after a few days of flirting at a Club Med resort. He titled it “Natural Born Feminist” and wrote about coming to the realization that it wasn’t just a misunderstanding but an actual rape with all the lasting emotional damage that entails.
He also wrote about his own education that a rape occurs when one person doesn’t consent to having sex, even if there is no screaming, blood or bruising.
Then he revealed that the “friend” was in fact his wife, the mother of his two daughters.
The head of the Conseil du statut de la femme, a provincial agency that advocates for equality between men and women, approached Koriass about bringing that message to a younger audience — in particular a male audience. He said “yes” right away.
“Even if it’s a bit ironic, regarding the fight for the equality of the sexes, guys are more willing to listen to a guy and more likely to identify with what I went through, with my positions,” he says.
Koriass is coming around slowly to the label of artiste engagé after first fretting about the expectation and responsibilities that entails.
“I’m allowing myself that title more and more because I think it fits well, because engagement means taking concrete actions to change things socially and right now that’s what I’m doing, mainly outside of music,” he says.
No surprise then, that Koriass identifies his politics as “progressive” or that, like many other socalled progressives in Quebec, he supports the province’s independence from Canada, as much for cultural as for economic reasons.
But in practical political terms, he’s more interested in latching onto particular projects than finding his spot on the left-right spectrum.
“People who live in poverty don’t have the luxury of saying whether they are right or left,” he says. “They are in the s---.”