The music vibrates on the North Shore, a little east of Sept-Îles. A breeding ground for Innu talent, the Uashat Mak Mani-Utenam community is now giving birth to what could very well be the first rap group in the region, the Native Mafia Family (NMF), bringing together young twenty-somethings talking about the reality in the ” rez”, the pen dipped in the daily life of the Innu, the ear stretched towards the new trends of the American and French rap scene. The collective will be performing on a Montreal stage for the first time on August 11, during the Nikamotan MTL concert, presented as part of the international festival Présence naturelle de Montréal.
Told like this by Joshua Mckenzie, aka Lildeuce24K, the origins of the Native Mafia Family are daunting, but the future of the project, born just four years ago, is fortunately much brighter.
“If I had to tell you the story of NMF, basically, it’s that of young people who have been hanging out together since primary school and who, when they started drinking, had fun doing little freestyles, says Joshua candidly. McKenzie. That’s not bad, the sad reality in the “rez [réserves], we start drinking young… But just for fun, we did freestyles. One day, we said to ourselves: Would it be fun, boys, if we had a studio to record our sounds? We would make models. That day, the Native Mafia Family made a decision: we made the choice to get into the music industry. Rap, a passion, now a goal, a career plan.
An extraordinary collective
The Native Mafia Family is a collective that does not only bring together musicians. It’s a team of about ten entrepreneurs, five of them rapping (in Innu, French or English), there’s also a manager, a videographer who takes care of creating the clips that the group files on YouTube. “And we are all independent, we want to do everything ourselves! Each of the members is involved in every aspect, we are even thinking of creating a hip-hop festival here, there are plenty of opportunities available to us. »
A hip-hop festival in Uashat Mak Mani-Utenam? And why not ? The Innu community is already in a way the Liverpool, the Seattle or the Saint-Hyacinthe of the First Nations. A breeding ground that continues to offer new musical talents since the immense success of the duo Kashtin in the late 1980s. Since 1985, there has also been the Innu Nikamu festival, founded by legends Florent Vollant and Philippe Mckenzie, a unifying event, of course, but which also arouses vocations within the community.
We are all independent, we want to do everything ourselves! Each of the members is involved in every aspect, we are even thinking of creating a hip-hop festival here, there are plenty of opportunities available to us.
The fact remains that Maliotenam is above all teeming with musicians who love country, folk, blues and rock; Made up of young people in their twenties, the Native Mafia Family is innovating and preparing today “a first real album”, as Lildeuce24K says, which has also released several solo songs. “The first inspiration that comes to mind is [le rappeur belge] Damso. My favorite: I like his touch, he’s really good, one of my greatest musical inspirations. His latest album (QALF, 2020), that’s what I want to do, this kind of productions not only created with software, but with real musicians and real instruments. »
However, for its fourth edition, the big show Nikamotan MTL set up by the talent incubator Musique nomade chose the meeting between indie folk and hip-hop, bringing together on stage rap artists Q-052 (Quentin Condo , Micmac rapper, he launched last May the album The Calm), Sensei H, Naya Ali, the Brown Family, with the Montreal pow-wow collective Buffalo Hat Singers and folk and traditional music artists Mikon Niquay-Ottawa, Matiu, Scott-Pien Picard, Willows and Soleil Launière. The perfect concept to allow the Native Mafia Family to taste its first big stages, rejoices Lildeuce24K, who participated the day before our interview in the first performance of the show, presented at the Innu Nikamu festival.
“It was the most important concert that the NMF has given to date, but I think it will be dethroned in a few days, during the concert in Montreal! »
The Nikamotan MTL concert will take place on August 11; Montreal’s international First Peoples’ Festival runs until August 18.