Ana Tijoux makes rap intimate when her 1977 Tour lands in Montreal

April 2, 2010, at the Green Room

By Merissa Nathan Gerson
Published: April 4th, 2010 | 10:10pm

In Montreal, they call Ana Tijoux “Hip-Hop’s Underground Reina.” Based on video presence alone, I wasn’t so sure—on YouTube, Tijoux looked like a lesser La Mala Rodriguez. But on stage, she was a whole different animal.

Tijoux brought an intimate, poised, trance-like show to a small, boiling-hot room of trilingual fans. It is clear that Ana Tijoux is no Mala. She is not a tough rapper. She is your best friend, your auntie, your badass neighbor whose voice carries notes that make a body quiver. She is the softest of raperas.

The entire crowd was throwing hands up, laughing hysterically at lines, reciting memorized lyrics, or simply rocking bodies and heads in agreement. Tijoux had that look in her eyes, as if walking in sync with something holier than a bar on a trendy street in Montreal—like a yoga teacher spinning words to a Montreal DJ’s beat.

The venue itself was a bare-bones hipster lounge lined with woodprints that featured a naked woman basking in the sun, a bear catching a fish, and a masturbating man floating in the galaxies. The crowd was diverse in age, color, and creed—not to mention tri-lingual, but then again, this is Montreal. The concert was delivered in three languages, diced up in split second intervals from French to Spanish to English. “Thank you, gracias, and merci,” Tijoux joked, having a total ball with a type of ease and joy that is severely rare with performers and severely contagious.

Raised in France and later living in Chile, Tijoux is the daughter of survivors from Pinochet’s dictatorship. Rebel Diaz—a Chilean but Bronx-based hip-hop group that toured with Tijoux shared this historical lineage. The trio consists of two brothers, RodStarz and G1, and a female “Afro-Boricua MC/songstress” by the name of Lah Tere. “Our parents were in concentration camps together under Pinochet’s dictatorship,” RodStarz tells me after the show. “We are linked through our history of struggle and through hip-hop.”

Tijoux is a return to hip-hop’s purer activist, community-oriented positivity. At the door staff handed out spray paint to advertise for Next, a film on graffiti culture by Pablo Aravena—a Montreal-based Chilean-Canadian filmmaker, and a friend of Ana Tijoux.

After his set, RodStarz stayed on as Tijoux’s sidekick throughout the show and looked honored and proud to be sharing the stage with the talented Tijoux. “I said la-a-dies,” she cooed. Her voice, in those rare moments of actual song, was enchanting and physically penetrating. Screams erupted in the room.

“Solo quiero la izquierda,” Tijoux sings. In English, it translates to “I only want the political left.” Later RodStarz belted out, “Last words on my lips. I am a revolutionary,” and threw a clenched fist in the air. Everyone in the room followed suit with raised fists in solidarity.

Towards the end of her set, Tijoux dedicated a song to J. Dilla, a.k.a James Dewitt Yancy, a renowned hip-hop producer who died of Lupus in 2006. She ended her forty-five minute set with the popular “Ana Tijoux—1977” and then a farewell, “Merci Boucus, Peace!” The crowd wanted more, chanting, “Otra! Otra!”

For the encore, she invited a man onto the stage who wielded an electric guitar—someone she had met on MySpace. While Fab (from opener Random Recipe) beat-boxes, Tijoux chanted a final litany, and then towards the end of the song, suddenly grabs the man’s guitar strings to clamp out the sound. She pauses and sings, “Say my name, say my name,” before laughing and the show is over. Forget Mala. Ana Tijoux is hip-hop’s underground queen bee.

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For more photos, visit Venus Zine’s Flickr page

Ana Tijoux MySpace

Nacional Records