Yann Ottawa aka The RZMN, from the Atikamekw Nation of Manawan, demands our full attention, as he teaches us about the life of his nation, both private and public. With his brother, he raps and sings in Atikamekw, using dramatic chords to coat his flow and melodic lines, sometimes filtered through autotune, and inclined to melancholy. Music runs in the Ottawa family: his father plays guitar and his brother enjoys percussion.
Obviously, he’s more inclined to hip-hop, reggaeton and rap keb, since he expresses himself a lot in French – and also in his mother tongue. In 2022, Yann Ottawa and his brothers released their first mixtape, Bigman Recordz, Vol. 1.
Unfortunately, it was raining on this Thursday evening, and RZMN and his colleagues performed on the main stage of the Place des Festivals in front of a plantation of umbrellas. Under the umbrellas, however, the humans remained captivated. In front of the umbrellas, certainly, there was mastered rap, there were hooks, there were choruses, there were real stories about real life on Atikamekw land, there was real beatmaking, there was a real good aboriginal rap show that we’ll have to see again and again.
