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The attitude, the words, the tone of voice, the assurance, everything seems to work for this 27-year-old woman. What gets Marie/Chloé so fired up? A few months after her solo flight, PAN M 360 wants answers!
Her trajectory, as she tells it:
“I was born in Lasalle. I grew up in a beautiful part of what some call the Bronx of Montreal. I had a beautiful childhood. After high school, I studied arts and communications at Cégep du Vieux-Montréal. At the age of 19, I travelled by bicycle for six months in India. When I got back, I reoriented myself – I got into rap and science.”
On the frosted side, Pilon-Vaillancourt is passionate about beatmaking, electric bass, and rap. In her early twenties, she loved hip hop like her friends. It suddenly became a real commitment.
“I started listening to a lot more of it when I began doing beats. I found my footing while listening to a lot of music. I’m currently a big fan of Belgian rap, so much so that I’ve been to Brussels twice in a year to meet people. That particular scene inspired me.”
Her first group was Bad Nylon, and she’s been in different feminine configurations since 2014. For an EP by Bad Nylon, she needed a stage name.
“I was squatting on a neighbour’s internet connection and the network name was Marie Gold. Perfect for me! The first name Marie is typically French, Gold has the bling of hip hop.”
Her parents don’t really listen to hip hop but her father, Gaétan Pilon, is a sound engineer. He owned Studio Victor, and later transformed the family home into a recording and mastering studio.
“I did a lot of stuff at my father’s studio myself. He lent me some equipment and I set up a small studio at home. And I do a lot of stuff there. School during the day, the studio at night.”
Passion for rap coincides with engineering. Upon returning from her nomadic post-adolescent year, she caught up on her high school and college studies in science to eventually enroll at the École Polytechnique of l’Université de Montréal. Today she is at the end of this long process and will soon become an engineer.
“I’d still like to swing between science and rap. But rap is not a plan B! I want to go all the way.” You can understand her. If Marie Gold’s career really takes off, Chloé Pilon will have to soft-pedal the physics.
And why persist in science at all when you have a rap career?
“I gained intellectual confidence by studying at Poly,” she says. “It gives me a sense of perspective, a capacity for analysis and a capacity to question things. These values are very important. As an engineer? I don’t see myself working at Bombardier, but rather in a startup, in an NGO dedicated to the environment.
“It’s going to be a game of elbow room, but there’ll always be a presence on both sides. I’m really glad I did this! I’m always going to do rap and engineering. I’m also a big reader, I don’t have the internet at home. Either I read, or I make music, or I study, or I see my friends, that’s my circle of activities. I’m an artist trying to find a balance between her personal, artistic, and intellectual lives.”
After having reformed Bad Nylon with a new cohort of collaborators, she chose to bring Marie Gold to the forefront.
“For my first EP, I produced myself with the support of a musician. I was doing my beatmaking, I was doing my bass tracks. I’m not doing that anymore. For the album, I surrounded myself with several producers. The Parisian collective Novengitum came to Montreal for a year and contacted me on Instagram. Since then, I still collaborate with them, even if they’ve returned to the Paris region. Igor Dubois mixed the whole album, there’s Déjà Vu, Comat, Francis Leduc-Bélanger, Désir Lister, mammouth, Daysiz, Mowley, DJ Kool, 2300.wav… a lot of beatmakers on the album!”
The content is not exclusively synthetic, the MC explains.
“Several instruments have been added. For instance, I had a beat and I’d go and see Francis, who’d make arrangements with me, involving various instruments – the violin section on ‘Impatiente’, the trumpet on ‘Pousse ta luck’, the double bass on ‘J’irai cracher sur vos tombes’, the piano on ‘Doser’, Clément Langlois-Légaré’s guitar on ‘Aucun bling’, etc. – and I’d go and see Francis and he’d do the arrangements with me.”
Pop enough or pop too much? Marie Gold is looking for the ideal dosage.
“I think some songs, like ‘Impatiente’ or ‘Mémoire’, are more pop, whereas ‘La seule règle’, ‘J’irai cracher sur vos tombes’ remain within a pop structure, but are a bit less radio-friendly. I was looking for the right balance. I want to reach a wider audience on one hand, and also my own initial audience on the other.
“I don’t see myself being simple, musically, but I’m fully into my more pop songs. I also want a certain complexity. My projects must have their own personality and address a variety of themes. With me on stage are a drummer and a DJ. In addition, I am currently preparing a new EP and a mixtape.”
One can guess that big names like Lydia Képinsky and J-Kyl (Jennifer Salgado) afford her a lot of credibility, since they agreed to join her in the studio for her first album. Marie Gold wants her lyrics to be solid and poetic. “I don’t have any direct literary references,” she says. “I try to tackle a variety of themes in the same way that I explore many musical directions.”
What’s more, Pilon-Vaillancourt fully embraces the feminism underlying her approach as a hip hop artist. The fact that she has regularly involved other women in her creative projects is certainly not a forced or uptight ideological gesture, the marked presence of strong feminine voices is self-evident.
“I certainly don’t want to be a female voice on generic beats for a rapper. I want to get out there! Like Sarahmée, MCM, Naya Ali, and Meryem Saci. There’s a feminine presence in keb rap, and WordUP! battles – Tyleen, Sereni T, Coco Béliveau, and Marie Vans for instance. But still, too few women are considering a real career in keb rap.”
This critical stance in no way prevents Marie Gold from claiming her allegiance to the local scene.
“I feel totally into keb rap. I’m very proud of this movement, I’m part of it, I have a sense of belonging. Loud’s first EP, for example, was a real source of inspiration. Keb rap takes all sorts of directions, but the Quebec identity is there. It’s an extended family.”
An inspiration for the Ordre des ingénieurs du Québec?
