'Cause t'es gone nulle part avec ta 9 piece luggage set (chuis jet set)

August 27, 2022 5:16 PM

Chiac is a French/English dialect from the Canadian province of New Brunswick, fluidly mixing English loaner words into principally French speech. Listening to chiac as song lyrics can be a delightful -- or disorienting -- experience for people, especially those with passing knowledge but not fluency in French. There are a lot of opportunities to find out, as there's no shortage of bands and musicians who record in chiac, from rap like Radio Radio's "Cliché Hot" to Lisa LeBlanc's "Gossip" to the bonkers brilliance of P'tit Belliveau's "Income Tax".

1755: The original chiac band -- formed in 1975, still going today. Rock/trad (fiddlin', banjo, etc.), with some songs much more on the French side of the spectrum like "Le Monde a Bien Changé", but others in a more chiac vein, like "C.B. Buddie" embracing that fluid French-English integration.

Radio Radio: arguably the most famous chiac band in Canada, thanks to the strong performance of their album, Belmundo Regal. "9 Piece Luggage Set" was the breakout track from the album. Radio Radio has released four albums since, including an all-English album (Light the Sky) before returning to chiac with 2021's À la Carte and bops like "Last Call".

Lisa LeBlanc: starting out as a "trash folk" musician, Lisa Leblanc records in chiac with songs like "Aujourd'hui, ma vie c'est d'la marde" (today, my life is shit), all-English tracks like "Could You At Least Wait 'Til I've Had My Coffee?" and full-French tracks like "Ti-Gars" (little guy). In 2020, she did a full pivot into disco, releasing Chiac Disco in 2022, including the all-time must-listen "Dans l'jus" (in the juice -- same sentiment as being 'in the weeds', i.e. too busy) She also does fun stuff on TikTok, such as taking her pet lobster for a walk.

P'tit Belliveau: more a straight comedy-music performer than Radio Radio or Leblanc, he largely jumped to national attention with "Income Tax", available on his first album, Greatest Hits. He's also recently relased Un homme et son piano.

Fayo: With a strighter guitar-folk sound, Fayo has released three albums, La Fièvre des fèves (tracks including "Saoul pi stoned", Accent Aigu (tracks including "J'ai back mové" and Fayo.

Menoncle Jason: Old-school country-folk, with slide guitar and all the trimmings, sometimes getting right into a Tennessee Three chug, Southwestern horns, or drifting into old-timey melancholy.

(Fayo's real name is Mario Leblanc, Menoncle Jason's is Jason Leblanc, and with Lisa LeBlanc one begins to wonder if there is some sort of Acadian Leblanc musical superclan out there)

Les Hay Babies straddle indie-folk and pop, moving from languid indie tracks like "Half du Temps" to recent tracks like "Same Old Same Old" moving more firmly into pop territory.

Les Hôtesses d'Hilaire are more of a straight comedy band, with a recent album Pas l'temps d'niaser delivering tracks that are still straght bops, like "Safe to Say".

There was actually a band named Chiac -- also from New Brunswick -- but a bit hard to track down information about. They seem to have released a single album, Le begueilleux, in a folk-trad vein, back in the 1990s(?).

Plywood Joe comes recommended via the New Brunswick subreddit; more of a comedy performer, with tracks like "All Okay".

Zéro Degré Celsius were '90s alt-rock stalwarts in New Brunswick; dormant since before the turn of the century. Tracks including "La Ballade du Captain Gallagher" and "Petitcodiac".

Finally, if you're looking for something a bit more aggro, Moncton punk band Pas Much delivers furious chiac! "On s'enva straight en Enfer" (we're going straight to hell) is representative of their self-declared "strict minimum" sound.

Still curious about chiac? The 1969 documentary Éloge du chiac (predating any of the bands listed above), primarily in French, is a series of interviews with a young French-language teacher about the difficulty of maintaining French in a society where English is increasingly the primary language.

posted by Shepherd (39 comments total)

That Lisa LeBlanc "Dans l'jus" track is so evocative of an era and straight fire, as the kids say.
posted by Kitteh at 5:40 PM on August 27, 2022

masterful post, Chirac's album might be my album of the year
posted by PinkMoose at 6:07 PM on August 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

My elderly neighbor hates rap music. Well, he really hates the racist strawman version of rap music he's created in his mind, which he will tell you about if you don't stop him. His primary complaint is that he can't understand anything they're saying.

Next time he's over here I'm going to play 9-piece Luggage Set (which is a bop - nice find!) and pretend that it's all in English. You can't understand this? That's weird, makes perfect sense to me!

There's just enough English in there - he will fall for this.
posted by adept256 at 6:17 PM on August 27, 2022 [11 favorites]

I don't have enough words to describe the delight I just took in watching Lisa Leblanc take her pet lobster for a walk.

Le(s)Blanc(s) sont un grand chose somehow I guess.

masterful post

Yes! Flagged as fantastic.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 6:27 PM on August 27, 2022 [3 favorites]

Don't miss the Gossip video, it is so fun!
posted by the primroses were over at 6:42 PM on August 27, 2022 [2 favorites]

There's just enough English in there - he will fall for this.

Then you say "Guess What?"
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 7:09 PM on August 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

> There's just enough English in there - he will fall for this.

Then you say "Guess What?"

No - for THIS scenario, you follow up with Prisencolinensinainciusol. (All right?)

...Very, very curious to hear this. This is EXACTLY the part of New Brunswick my grandmother was from, and I've studied French (a little) - curious to know if this may explain why Grandma's efforts to teach Grandpa French went a bit pear-shaped.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:32 PM on August 27, 2022 [3 favorites]

Great post! There are also vocabulary differences between Acadian and Quebec French. Some are described here in the Wikipedia article.
posted by sfred at 7:39 PM on August 27, 2022 [2 favorites]

No - for THIS scenario, you follow up with Prisencolinensinainciusol yt . (All right?)

This deserves a little more explanation. I may be making a fool of myself but I think this is the Italian artist who was frustrated by the popularity of Italian singers making bank off singing in English for an Italian audience. His gamble was to write a hit song in English-sounding gibberish. It fooled people, they thought it was English and it was a hit.
posted by adept256 at 7:55 PM on August 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

see also, the adventures of Acadieman in Chiac
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 8:26 PM on August 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

LeBlanc is just a very common Acadian family name, so my guess would be that the three musicians aren’t all closely related.
posted by eviemath at 8:30 PM on August 27, 2022 [2 favorites]

> This deserves a little more explanation. I may be making a fool of myself but I think this is the Italian artist who was frustrated by the popularity of Italian singers making bank off singing in English for an Italian audience. His gamble was to write a hit song in English-sounding gibberish. It fooled people, they thought it was English and it was a hit.>

Skimming
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisencolinensinainciusol
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adriano_Celentano

the guy was and is huge, and this was a comedic stunt and social statement that I'd prefer to guess most listeners were in on.

By the 1960s, Celentano was already one of the most popular rock musicians in Italy, in large part due to his appearance at the Sanremo Music Festival in 1960 and the subsequent success of his song "24.000 baci".

...

Celentano has retained his popularity in Italy for over 50 years, selling millions of records and appearing in numerous TV shows and movies[1]

...

Celentano's intention with the song was not to create a humorous novelty song but to explore communication barriers. The intent was to demonstrate how English sounds to people who don't understand the language proficiently. "Ever since I started singing, I was very influenced by American music and everything Americans did. So at a certain point, because I like American slang—which, for a singer, is much easier to sing than Italian—I thought that I would write a song which would only have as its theme the inability to communicate. And to do this, I had to write a song where the lyrics didn't mean anything."[6

https://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/2009/12/23/celentano-quel-mio-rap-senza-senso.html, translated:

...

Celentano was going through a very successful period, with songs that systematically climbed the Hit Parade. In the same year he also made an ecological and committed piece such as A tree of thirty floors, in which Celentano attacked building speculation, protested against pollution and was especially angry with the Pirelli skyscraper in Milan, a structure that, for the in fact, it was made up of 30 floors. Track that was part of an album entirely dedicated to hot topics, programmatically entitled The Evils of the Century. It was a surprise, therefore, to hear on November 3, 1972, a piece which meant nothing, which had no text in any language, which apparently had no message. But that song was a huge success and became one of the classics of Celentano's repertoire.

posted by sebastienbailard at 9:01 PM on August 27, 2022 [2 favorites]

Oh hey! I'm excited to see a post about this; I am Acadian on my father's side and Lisa LeBlanc is from the same area where he and his family grew up. Chiac Disco is absolutely fantastic - probably my favourite stuff from her so far. She also has a fun banjo cover of Ace of Spades floating around somewhere.

I'm especially pleased to see Les Hay Babies included as well! I think the track I like the most from them is "J'ai vendu mon char".
posted by one of these days at 9:04 PM on August 27, 2022 [2 favorites]

man those are some incredible accents, new brunswick is a trip. I can barely understand half of the income tax return song and it's got subtitles. Do they really say "j'vais" like "vau"? Wild stuff! Also cliche hot is a straight banger.
posted by dis_integration at 9:14 PM on August 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

Les Hôtesses d'Hilaire are more of a straight comedy band, with a recent album Pas l'temps d'niaser delivering tracks that are still straght bops, like "Safe to Say."

This is really great.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 9:16 PM on August 27, 2022

Acadian French is wild because it’s actually older: “ Since there was relatively little linguistic contact with France from the late 18th century to the 20th century, Acadian French retained features that died out during the French standardization efforts of the 19th century.” (Wikipedia)
posted by warriorqueen at 9:32 PM on August 27, 2022 [5 favorites]

Cool la chanson! My dear departed MiL grew up in North Nigeria in a French + Toubou + Lebanese family. It was a stitch listening to her and her sisters gabbing on in a seamless word salad of English, French and Hausa. Thanks for the deluge of links: my Sunday is now nostalgically sorted.
posted by BobTheScientist at 11:17 PM on August 27, 2022

I'm a Canadian frog on my mom's side and TIL about all of this. Like BobTheScientist said I know what the Sunday soundtrack is going to be. Thank you.
posted by Sheydem-tants at 11:20 PM on August 27, 2022

Acadian French is wild because it’s actually older:

You see this a lot with diaspora and immigrant language actually - e.g. there are archaic dialects of Chinese spoken in Canadian Chinatowns, and a lot of US Italian would seem incredibly old-fashioned to someone from modern Italy.
posted by Dysk at 11:23 PM on August 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

Belmondo Régal is the shit. Cargué dans ma chaise (first song on the album) is my default get up and go jam.
I appreciate Lisa Leblanc de detour to disco, but she might never top Ma vie c'est dla marde. It's the perfect petty complaint song. Y'en aura pas d'facile.
posted by Freyja at 3:04 AM on August 28, 2022 [2 favorites]

My favorite of this genre is Dekshoo. (music starts at about 40 seconds).
posted by Peach at 3:24 AM on August 28, 2022

New Brunswicker here - amazing post! We ran into this when a (western Canada) contractor made the mistake of hiring a Quebec French speaker to localize an instruction script - we had to do the whole thing over again with a New Brunswick French speaker.
posted by Mogur at 3:31 AM on August 28, 2022 [9 favorites]

"Aujourd'hui, ma vie c'est d'la marde" was in a Letterkenny episode and consequently on high-rotation in my household. I pegged it as Acadian (I'm from Nova Scotia) but did not know about chiac. Thanks for this post!
posted by joannemerriam at 6:42 AM on August 28, 2022 [2 favorites]

This is fantastic. Though for brief moments at times it does make me wonder if getting my father (Francophone from New Brunswick) to tutor my kids in French is the stroke of genius I thought it was...
posted by From Bklyn at 7:52 AM on August 28, 2022 [2 favorites]

I worked with two Quebecois from the island and an Acadian at a giant tree nursery out in rural BC. One of the primary intentions of the Quebecois were there to improve their english, so they resisted using French, even adopting English nicknames. The Acadian spoke French, Italian, English, in that order. It wasn't long before the job site curses were all Chiac liberally salted with Joul (blue collar Quebecois).

I heard many of the curses before, especially as they were generally broadcast on Hockey Nite in Canada unedited. Most of the equipment rapidly earned very salty Catholic insult names - so I operated a 'torrieu 5 tonne', which loosely translated as the small crane that is an affront to god. While the bigger crane earned variations of "La grue décâlisser la yeul*", which is a pretty Joul phrase for the crane will fuck up your face which or "le crâne décâlisser la tete" as crane in English is also skull in French, and shut up is ferme la tête.


*it's been 20 years so expect some drift from the actual slang.
posted by zenon at 8:40 AM on August 28, 2022 [8 favorites]

It feels like I've fallen into some alternate timeline where Cajun was not eradicated. I've heard tons of Quebecois and it never hit me like this. Y'all. This is the cadence and accent I grew up with and never heard at the same time. I found myself in tears listening to all of this. For all you Cajuns reading this, listen to the mother of the musician P'tit Belliveau here in this little documentary. I can't believe it. It's unreal to me.

Thank you, Shepherd for this unexpected nugget of joy and sadness.
posted by garbhoch at 10:13 AM on August 28, 2022 [16 favorites]

I feel that so much, garbhoch. As a monoglot American descendant of both Nouvelle France and Le Grand Dérangement, there’s something in this music that makes my spirit call out to The Ancestors in such a primal way. So close and yet so very far.

I don’t wanna learn Parisian French, I wanna learn this French. But even then it wouldn’t be the same. :/
posted by The demon that lives in the air at 12:30 PM on August 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

This is exactement how je parle francais, which I learned d’un rural quebecois guy avec qui j’ai travaillé a un summer camp d’immersion quand j’avais quinze years old.
posted by nouvelle-personne at 12:49 PM on August 28, 2022 [10 favorites]

Back in the day when CBC Radio 3 did podcasts, and would be available to download outside of Canada, Radio Radio was in their prime with “Dekshoo” and “Guess What?” Radio Radio also saw airplay on the French sibling station, Bande à part, which I loved to listen to in spite of knowing maybe 10 words of French.
posted by stannate at 12:50 PM on August 28, 2022 [2 favorites]

In addition to informal immersion avec mon ami Quebecois, I also took high school French, which in Ontario is un imitation de l’accent Parisienne mais toujours taught by middle aged Italians. (Pourquoi? J’sais poh). Alors, mon accent est super-weird, mais I do know tous les churchy swear words, câlice hostie tabarnak! All this to say that je basically parle français exactement comme these singers, mais from very different source influences!
posted by nouvelle-personne at 12:59 PM on August 28, 2022 [6 favorites]

What an amazing post. Thank you, Shepherd. There's so much great music to digest in this post.

I find myself doing this (mixing languages) all the time - not because I know any particular language other than english, but because I've dabbled in other languages and like throwing in their words. Often times those words seem more concise or representative of what I'm trying to say than my native tongue. Plus- it's just fun - and music makes it more so. Dans la pluie, tu t'ennui.
posted by mrzz at 1:48 PM on August 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

P'tit Belliveau's more recent J'aimerais d'avoir un John Deere video is a work of art, and perhaps even more demented than Income Tax.
posted by scruss at 1:49 PM on August 28, 2022 [4 favorites]

-- monsieur sulu, warp factor trois

-- maudit - non go, c'est le tractor beam!

-- c'est star trek ou hee haw?

-- Où es-tu ce soir, pourquoi m'as-tu laissé all alone ...
posted by pyramid termite at 2:52 PM on August 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

As an Anglo trying my best to learn French (and Joual) this is 100% my jam. Thank you!

Also, Lisa LeBlanc's "Ace of Spades" on banjo is real nice.
posted by anthill at 3:20 PM on August 28, 2022

You haven't really played scrabble until you've played bilingual scrabble (words from both languages are valid).
posted by Mitheral at 6:32 PM on August 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

Holy crap, Lisa LeBlanc's frailing on Ace of Spades! Surprised she has any fingers left after that
posted by scruss at 7:11 PM on August 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

> No - for THIS scenario, you follow up with Prisencolinensinainciusol . (All right?)

This deserves a little more explanation.....

Oh, Metafilter is indeed familiar with Prisencoliensinainciusol; we've had two posts about it already.

....And on topic:

I am suddenly now remembering something I've amused myself with a couple times; I have a copy of Great Big Sea's cover of the Quebecois song Le Bon Vin, a song which they reportedly learned phonetically from a New Brunswick friend of the band's. Which I assumed surely must have lead to some lost-in-translation errors (Alan Doyle's accent is not the best). I've played it for 3 fluent French speakers; the first two burst out laughing within ten seconds of hearing it, and the third just blinked for a few puzzled seconds before asking, "Is this even French?"

....Now I'm wondering if it is indeed French after all, or if it's Chiac.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:50 PM on August 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

a delightful -- or disorienting -- experience for people, especially those with passing knowledge but not fluency in French

It seems to alternate between delightful and disorienting on a per-song basis, at least with my middle-school-plus-Duolingo French.
posted by fedward at 10:33 AM on August 29, 2022

For comparison, EC, here is a version from a Quebecois (not chiac speaking) group called La bottine souriante
And I absolutely must include la ziguezon in here. You can start singing this in many francophone bars in canada and discover quickly who has their spoons

(literally every time I've seen this happen, people have pulled spoons out from unknown hiding places!)
posted by Acari at 11:06 AM on September 2, 2022