20 years of The Academy of Massacre | The strange refinement of the barbarians

Oscar Souto exclaims, while his comrade frowns, not sure to recognize himself in what he hears. “Anyone else would make songs like that and it would just be vulgar to be vulgar. With Mononc’, there is a refinement, an elegance in the text, which you cannot find elsewhere. » The great priest of rhyme trashSerge of his first name, and the legends of thrash local metal, Anonymus, celebrate 20 years of The Academy of Massacre.

Refined, Mononc’Serge? The shy man denies it, although it has to be admitted: no one else can, on the same album, chant ” Fuck you Maman Dion” and quote… Heidegger.

It was at the defunct COOL FM radio that the slumbering punk in Serge Robert received his first validation ration. “When I heard that a new rock radio station was being born in Montreal, I imagined that they would play Éric Lapointe and La Chicane, he recalls, that kind of rock. But against all odds, the station will be faithful, for a brief period, to its commitment to the musical margin, unheard of for a so-called commercial radio.

Obscure artists such as Les Cowboys Fringants, WD-40 and Arseniq33 will thus frequent the top of the charts for the first time (and for the only time, in many cases). MarijuanaMononc’Serge’s ironic hymn that the green leaf should never be legalized, will transform him in the eyes of many into an irresistible figure of counter-cultural insubordination.

“The idea that I belong to theunderground, for me, it was something completely eccentric”, recalls Mr. Robert, 53 years old, well wedged in the threadbare armchair of the room of rehearsal of Anonymus. “I had always seen myself, first and foremost, as a songwriter in the Brassens tradition, and that’s how I continue to see myself,” he says, although his libido- blasphemy has long since swallowed it.

In the summer of 2001, it was therefore quite logical, but to the great astonishment of the main party concerned, that Uncle Serge was invited to board the alterno caravan of Pollywog, the Quebec Lollapalooza of the time, in which this that year Lofofora, Groovy Aardvark, Raid and Anonymus.

Clear-sighted, the manager of Anonymus offers them to invite the new kid to scream Marijuanawith them, on the encore, the song corresponding naturally to the muscle of the blast beats and cracked amps at 11.

unholy union

The fruit of this impious union between thrash metal and trash speech gave in 2003 The Academy of Massacrea title in the form of a spit in the face of Star Academyreality TV which then crystallized the very opposite of the values ​​embodied by this atomic fusion between the linguistic excesses of a Mononc’Serge and the distortion of Anonymus, made up of Oscar (bass) and Daniel Souto (guitar), Carlos Araya (drums) and Marco Calliari (guitar, since left to push the Italian ditty, replaced by Jef Fortin).

With his galvanized rereadings of classics from Mononc’Serge’s repertoire such as Potatoes, Die for Canada And The ADISQ gala, the first album of the supergroup of desecration will crystallize the image of Mononc’Serge as an itchy bitch of Quebec showbiz. Almost against his will.

Extract of Potatoesby Mononc’Serge and Anonymus

“When I left Les Colocs, I wrote more serious songs, which I performed, and which nobody wanted. After losing his musicians to Lhasa de Sela (including guitarist Yves Desrosiers), Serge Robert ended up on the air at CIBL in 1997, where he laid down silly and nasty refrains inspired by current events. It was when he stumped Jacques Villeneuve that a record company finally showed up.

“I have been trapped! “, he exclaims, in the tone of one who would plead not guilty, and for whom the main joy contained in a song like Sebastien Benoit is not to chant that he doesn’t like the host, but to hear his metalhead friends screaming in the second part of the text that they adore him.

But does he still see it as a prison, as this deflagrating tone to which he has often been reduced? Because come to think of it, there are thousands of serious songwriters, while songwriters about potatoes or the deadly swelling of a Pink Floyd show…

“It’s just that sometimes, answers Mononc’, I put a lot of time and effort into songs in which I work every line, and nobody gives a damn about those songs. But sometimes I write a song that in my eyes is totally fucked up, and that’s always the one that people end up liking. »

“But I know there is a pleasure in transgression, in laughing at what shouldn’t be laughed at. Refined and wise, Uncle Serge.

This Saturday, June 17, at 9 p.m., at MTELUS, and on tour throughout Quebec