“GAFA Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon are the masters of the world. They program us every day like drones. But no one believes him. We do not realize that in slaves we go in front of the 1%. ”
The year 2021 will forever be the year in which Nicola Ciccone launched a song in which he pronounces the words “big boobs” with an almost papal gravity that the words “big boobs” had never known until then. Armed with an intensity worthy of a Leo Ferré roaring his loneliness, and a tearful piano November Rain, the songwriter denounces in GAFA the hold on our minds of these giants of the web, thanks to words somewhere between paranoid decompensation and the fact that we are quite correct in technodependence, although without the finesse of a chronicle by Matthieu Dugal.
The year 2021 will forever remain the one in which we collectively wondered what could go well with Nicola Ciccone, he who, for the record, has nevertheless already won two Félix crowning male performer of the year (in 2007 and 2009) as well as a statuette dedicating the song of the year (it was for I just love you in 2004). “And we laugh and we laugh, everything is ridiculous here”, he coos, but should we laugh at GAFA, the most “messed up” ritornello of the last 12 months? Was that the goal?
In a café on rue Beaubien, the charming forty-something, blue jacket over jeans, gratifies the author of these lines with one of those devastating smiles which have undoubtedly already caused many gasps. “I knew what I was doing writing that song. If we really listen to it, we understand that there is an irony, a second degree. The media, you have the click bait ”, he explains about
6˚tt of this trick of dressing an article with a sensationalist headline in order to fool the readership. “Me, I have the song bait. ” GAFA would therefore be nothing less than a hook song, which social networks have bitten vigorously.
When I wrote it, I said to myself: this one must not go unnoticed. You know I have a masters degree in psychology, I thought about it before choosing the four letter word [lolo]. I didn’t want it to be a vulgar word, but I wanted it to react. When I look at all the cultural projects you [les journalistes] were bombed this fall, I tell myself that having made so much talk about me is mission accomplished.
Nicola Ciccone, on her earworm GAFA
Nicola Ciccone would not however hate that once the surprise received, the media are interested in the rest of his 13e (!) album titled Gratitude (especially at Dignity, which denounces the abandonment to which the elders are delivered). He would also not hate if we were interested in the message of GAFA, in which he believes hard as cobalt, and with which it is difficult not to at least to agree a little, so much the deleterious effects of Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon on the quality of the public debate, on the environment and on local economies have been documented.
“I am not the one who invented this, the polarization of the media or the disappearance of Select, the largest independent distributor in Quebec [survenue en juillet dernier]. The reception of the song proves its premise: we laugh, we laugh, as I say in the chorus, but we don’t dwell on the rest of what it says. ”
Child of the Ramones
PHOTO DAVID BOILY, THE PRESS
Nicola Ciccone practices self-deprecation a lot.
Anyone who knows Nicola Ciccone’s work knows that he has always been well versed in the art of not taking himself too seriously. He also specifies that he really liked the parody of the lip imitator Ariel Charest – “She made me better!” – even if his team demanded its removal for copyright reasons.
Gratitude contains a track (almost) as hilarious as GAFA entitled Dynamite, in which a Generation X runner is flirted with in the Dead Obies’ Frenglish by a Generation Y runner. Difficult not to mention Food trip (from his 2001 album, Nightwalker), a kind of relaxed rock version of a Celtic punk rhythm, in
which Ciccone describes the overwhelming amounts of food he dreams of swallowing in order to soothe his belly filled with “cannabis and beer” – you read that right. “One could say, with affection, that it is [parmi les siennes] the favorite song of the Plateau clique, ”he laughs.
“If we start from the premise that I make variety [il insiste sur le mot variété], I can’t make an album with 12 love songs, ”thinks the one whose repertoire of course includes several refrains soaked in rosewater, but also many social songs (The immigrant, Autistic, Song for Mary), as well as a number of deliberately funny titles (At CEGEP Where The legend of Joe Wannabe), inseparable from the admiration his father bequeathed to him for cartoonists.
It is perhaps worth remembering that Nicola Ciccone’s favorite band were the Ramones, who themselves had an irresistible sense of humor, and that Phil Anselmo, leader of the Texas groove metal group Pantera is one of his musical heroes.
When I make an album, I always try to include songs that are a little more crazy, or weird, that appeal to a part of a certain Montreal fauna. You know, people I meet in bars and with whom I always have a lot of fun.
Nicola Ciccone
The criterion of shooters
The line between laughing with someone and laughing at someone remains thin, however. Nicola Ciccone is it sometimes hurt to have become like some kind of punchline ? It all depends on the context, answers the one who declared in 2017 to Press that he respects musical critics “if they are ready to drink a few shooters with [lui] “. The debonair attitude that he will display throughout our interview attests to this. The man seemed especially happy to talk about punk, as well as being able to shed light on the intention behind GAFA, even if given the time, a green tea and a cappuccino must have played the role of shooters.
In the wake of the release of Gratitude, the singer participated in The evening is (still) young, will he remind several times, as if to testify to his self-mockery. “Someone having fun, I don’t mind. I’ll even help them have fun. “Only downside: he would appreciate that his real successes benefit from as much media light as GAFA
Oh you my father, created for his father as he headed for his ultimate rest, has racked up nearly two million streams on YouTube. “And it’s a song that no one has talked about in the media!” AT Everybody talks about it, we asked everyone what they thought of GAFA, except to its author. ”
What about the web tycoons? They are shaking with fear. “Look, on October 4, Instagram and Facebook crashed,” Nicola says with a mischievous eye. “A few weeks later, Mark Zuckerberg changed the name of his company. Of course it’s not my fault, but I would like to jokingly claim some responsibility for that. ”