The first time Trump said Canada should become 51e State of the United States, I had the same reaction as you.
I figured he was joking.
“Another floodgate from the Big Orange.”
Well no.
The guy is serious.
He really thinks that Canadians (and Quebecers) would be better off if they sang The Star-Spangled Banner in the morning when getting up.
Well then.
AN INTENSIVE CARE CULTURE
I imagine you thought the same thing as me when you saw the message Trump posted on his social media a few minutes after Justin announced his resignation.
“Becoming American? Never! I’m not Elvis Gratton! I don’t walk around in a star-spangled Speedo! I don’t think that the Americans have it, they have it! I value my difference! To my tongue! To my culture!”
Oh yes?
A few days ago, the journalist Jean-Hugues Roy (a former colleague of the newspaper See) signed a very interesting text in The Press.
He asked ADISQ to provide him with the list of the 10,000 most listened to songs in Quebec on the different Music platforms: Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Audio, Slacker, etc.
Then he calculated what percentage of those songs were local songs.
Result: in 2024, there are only 782 Quebec songs (622 in French and 160 in other languages) among the 10,000 that were most listened to in Quebec.
“The proportion of Quebec artists in this deluge of musical bytes has never been so low,” he writes. In April 2024, Quebec musicians represented barely 6.1% of total listening, a historic low since the data was compiled. When you take the weekly percentages and plot them on a graph, it reads like the electrocardiogram of a patient in intensive care.”
Do you know what day we listen to the most Quebec songs?
Yes. At Midsummer.
That day, we suddenly remember that we are Quebecois.
“Is Gilles Vigneault dead? No? So let’s go find him and ask him to sing one of his songs! Ferland too! Oh, is he dead? Let’s take Raymond Lévesque, then! Is he dead too? Fuck…”
The rest of the time, we mostly listen to American music.
Like Elvis Gratton.
GOD IS AN AMERICAN
In Quebec, we call ourselves green.
While the best-selling car is the Ford F-150 truck.
The same goes for culture.
We say we care about our culture, but with a few exceptions, we don’t go see our movies or listen to our songs.
And when I go to the theater, I see more white faces than at a meeting of the Society of Saint-Jean-Baptiste.
The reality is that we are more and more American in our heads.
Politically, we do not (yet) belong to the United States. But culturally, yes.
“Living in this country is like living in the United States,” Charlebois sang in 1973.
Fifty-two years later, it’s even more true.
Fou, Trump? Ridicule?
No. Just prophetic.
