(Saint-Augustin-de-Desmaures) Sitting on a bench, in the middle of the afternoon, in the courtyard of his former primary school, Keith Kouna, with his face of a veteran of the ships of the night and his hair of a celestial tramp, does not does not at all resemble the typical resident of the rather tidy suburb that Saint-Augustin-de-Desmaures is today.
But Sylvain Côté, 48, is indeed a pure product of Saint-Aug’ (pronounced Saint-Thug), a city which, when he was a child, carried its share of prejudices. “It was really less developed. In the past, Saint-Aug’ was the hole. At the Polyvalente in Sainte-Foy, even the teachers disgusted the world of Saint-Aug’! » Small smirk. “Well, today, the math teacher who called us farmer, she stays here. »
It is the posthumous gift of his grandmother Lucina, a plot of land lying on his will for his grandson, who will quietly bring the double K back to his hometown, in 2007.
PHOTO EDOUARD PLANTE-FRÉCHETTE, THE PRESS
Keith Kouna
I was living in a screechingly lost time. I was staying in Limoilou and I decided to sacrifice everything there to set up a trailer with a large tarp on the land I had inherited. It was fucking redneck and it gave the best summer of my life.
Keith Kouna
Don’t fall asleep
Officially the owner for a year of a real house in the city of his first bad shots, Keith Kouna, father of a 5-year-old boy, has not however metamorphosed into an obedient suburbanite, if we are to believe Metastases.
On his fifth solo album, as long and proliferating as a double disc, the singer turns into a cabaret crooner (mummies), parodist of Trenet (Old people running), new wave necromancer (Corpses), Baudelairian diarist (The narrative), shemale cowboy (to the four winds), stellar rocker (He’s a bum) and wrathful victim of endemic stupidity (People).
Et si l’album blanc avait été enregistré par quatre fans de Tom Waits et des Bérus, plutôt que par les Beatles ? Ça aurait peut-être ressemblé à ça. Parce que comme sur l’album blanc, Métastases alterne entre d’indéniables grandes chansons (Au revoir, Américaines) et une série de chansonnettes volontairement bouffonnes. Bien qu’il possède un coup de pinceau virtuose digne des fresques dégoulinantes de stupre et de sang de Géricault, Keith Kouna ne peut s’empêcher de semer ici et là quelques barbots, d’une fabuleuse impertinence.
Il serait néanmoins injuste de réduire Métastases à ses facéties, tant cette œuvre-somme réalisée par Alexandre Martel trouve sa cohérence dans ses apparentes contradictions, sa part de chansons absurdes devenant une manière de miroir de l’absurdité de cette vie à laquelle il serait une erreur de ne pas parfois tirer la langue.
Qu’est-ce que la liberté, selon le poète punk ? « C’est faire ce que tu veux faire. Avoir du temps. Te faire du fun. Et c’est aussi ne pas avoir peur du ridicule. Très tôt, avec Les Goules [son ancien groupe], I learned that, and it allowed me everything. The world is often caught in questions like “What will other people think?” Cuddling up helps. »
Thanks to Miller
This fear of compromise that corrupts is easily understood by glancing in the rearview mirror of Keith Kouna who, in his early twenties, will leave Quebec with an open ticket for Europe. He will dabble there for several months, guided by dreams that had planted in his noggin his frequentation of the universe of Henry Miller.
Because if he played, at 15, 16, Slayer and Iron Maiden with his buddies in the basement of a disused bank in Saint-Aug’, the little Côté was also a precocious reader, who had had the books of the author of the Air-Conditioned Nightmare in the hands from adolescence.
PHOTO OLIVIER PONTBRIAND, LA PRESSE ARCHIVES
Keith Kouna performing
I left with $100, I lived singing in bars and trams. I landed in Montpellier, I went to sing in front of restaurants, I started chatting with people and, finally, I was offered a place to sleep. Today, I would do that and I’d have the cops in my ass.
Keith Kouna
Les Goules, a group born at the beginning of the millennium from the musico-ethylic delusions in which his friends plunged in the evening before going to the bar, will monopolize him for a time on his return. A long detour after which he will return in 2008 to his own repertoire, which continues to flourish on the sidelines, with his bias for the all crooked, the exploited, the sharks and the dirty.
“The idea is to last and above all not to wait for medals, money and success, observes Kouna. There is a base of self-demand that I try to cultivate, because what scares me the most is softening up, falling asleep, getting lazy, giving it easy to me. But if you stock up well, people will be there. Anyway, there have always been too well-known people who shouldn’t be, and little-known people who shouldn’t be anymore. »
June 15, at 9 p.m., at Foufounes Électriques, and on tour throughout Quebec