In March, Montreal R&B duo Rau_Ze released Virer nos vies, their debut album. Since then, this daring project, whose vocal tracks were recorded from singer Rose Perron’s closet, seems to have struck a chord with a rather large audience—and with good reason!
Virer nos vies has found an echo, not just for its striking technical qualities, but also for its realistic outlook. Many young workers, forced to balance between ballooning rents and poverty wages, recognize themselves in this album. In each of Perron’s flight of lyricism, she addresses frankly the bleak existence and the precarity of today’s youth, “living on hunger and loneliness”, and afflicted by romantic woes. The song Crève, in which the duo express their outrage at the violence inflicted on women in the workplace, sums up fairly well the basic logic of capitalist exploitation: “For every dollar, you make a cent.”
While the topics explored by Rau_Ze point towards a rejection of this system that forces us to spend our whole lives trying to make a living, the album still leaves us with a militant and energizing feeling. In the words of Félix Paul, lyricist of the band : “Music has to be anchored in our epoch, at least politically … In a society riven by deep contradictions, it is important not to hide them, but to try to exacerbate them with our art.”
And Virer nos vies certainly succeeds in doing so, with pop instrumentals accessible to a wide audience, and offering more than a simple description of the harshness of living conditions under capitalism. Virer nos vies is also, above all, a scathing pamphlet, a call to arms that fires up our determination to stand up to our masters in the real world.
By “turning their lives upside down” (“Virer [leurs] vies à l’envers”) and screaming the naked truth into our ears, Rose Perron and Félix Paul may be going further than the title of their album suggests: they’re literally calling for us to change our lives.
