All photos by Renaud Philippe via FEQ
I owe Flo Rida’s agent 40 dollars. They’re Canadian dollars and I don’t know what the exchange rate is like, but I definitely owe him 40 dollars. In fairness, some of this is his fault for assuming that jumping in my taxi to the airport at 3 AM after drinking at the Quebec City Hilton’s hotel bar was a good idea, but I still feel bad. I just honestly couldn’t find my debit card when the driver pulled up. He tried to find me at the terminal after check-in, but he was hammered, I was delayed, and he didn’t recognize me without my Red Hot Chili Peppers fedora.
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I’ve opened this recap of Le Festival d’été de Québec with an admission about Flo Rida’s agent for three reasons. Firstly, I really do feel bad about not getting that 40 dollars back to him. Secondly, I want to casually drop the fact that I met Flo Rida’s agent and, somehow, bask in Flo Rida’s reflected glow as a result. But third, and most important of all, I want to talk about that fedora.
(Some background: I purchased this fedora at the Red Hot Chili Peppers show a few hours before jumping into the taxi. I purchased it for 20 dollars, not the 15 dollars that I tried to haggle the vendor down to, because “I don’t need to do this, I will obviously sell it if not to you.” It was black, mostly plastic, and ill-fitting for anyone with a face more robust than the bloke who plays the really nerdy one you want to beat up on The Big Bang Theory. Around its brim, in a font that looked like the bastard child of Impact and Comic Sans, were the words RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS. I have never loved an item of clothing as much as I loved that fedora and I imagine that I never will again. May the Air Canada flight attendant who finds it give it a good and loving home.)
When Flo Rida’s agent—whom I will refer to only as “Flo Rida’s Agent” half for privacy purposes and half because I can’t remember the guy’s name—drunkenly slumped into my taxi, he had no idea that he was getting into a taxi with a man who had in his possession only a small backpack and a Red Hot Chili Peppers fedora. Had he seen it from outside of the taxi, perhaps he would have thought twice about getting in, would have taken his chances on missing his flight back to New York.
It is difficult to maintain a serious conversation with a fellow human when you have in your possession a Red Hot Chili Peppers fedora, regardless of how lit that fedora may be. People look at you differently. But there’s an important cultural shift that needs to be drawn out here when talking about this festival and the great nation of Canada as I know it: Flo Rida’s agent was, like me, British. He was, therefore, born with an innate and stifling sense of shame and moderation. But in Quebec, the locals looked upon me as a God when I wore my fedora.
Why did they do this? I propose, after spending 48 hours in the city, that there is something special about the people of Quebec. They are naturally respectful and polite, but blessed with a keen eye for beauty and aesthetic perfection. This would explain why, in the midst of an 11-day festival, there is no trash on the floor in Quebec City, despite the fact that there are approximately three public trash cans in the entire city. It would explain why they live in one of the prettiest cities in North America and have, as far as I can tell, no cigarette smokers in the entire city.
But how does one end up buying a Red Hot Chili Peppers fedora and wearing it with pride? How can a city, it’s festival, and it’s people have such an effect on you after only a matter of hours that you can have everything you know about headwear, about life, flipped around?
Excellent pants.
It begins with Radio Radio, a rap group that sound to the untrained ear like a Québécois Lonely Island but are in fact something distinct and unique, something I will refer to as l’ip-eup. Drinking a Molson and watching Radio Radio perform a song about deck shoes–called “Dekshoo”–will bring about a shift in a person’s conscience. They appear for all the world to be a drawing of a handsome man and a sidekick in excellent, neon leopard pants, but they are local heroes, the kind that get 10,000 people to sing along with lines like Shopping channel vendre un scam / Copy coller chu comme damn / Basically so basic / Avec mes pennie loafers.”
Radio Radio were the first band that I saw, wide-eyed, fresh to the city, and nothing would or could be the same after that. Quebec is unique. It is fiercely proud of its francophone artists and, by the time the band have run through “50 Shades of Beige,” it’s clear to see why. Who wouldn’t want to hear a song, in French, that turns erotic fiction into an ode to dull-colored sweaters?
Bemused, I take the short walk to watch Bryan Ferry on the main stage, a man who looks like he’d shag your girlfriend, decline to apologize, and then spend an hour over a bottle of mediocre cognac telling you how to “engage in the act of love-making.” He’s British, Bryan Ferry, and that’s why he would use the word “shag,” but he has a French soul.
“Now, son, let me tell you something about love-making.”
Outside the old walled city, through the parking lots and mid-range bars, is the Imperial Bell. It’s there that Unknown Mortal Orchestra are playing their headline set, slow jamming everything—EVERYTHING—and sweeping everybody up with them. They’re a tightly-honed live act by this point, but again, Quebec has a different take. This small club is about three-quarters full to see a band that would sell out something twice the size just a few miles south in their homeland.
So yeah, it’s unique as a city for music: more French, more polite, downright more sexy. But you can tell a lot about a city by its intoxicated, and they, too, are magnificent.
At a pub called Ninkasi in the early hours of Saturday morning in downtown, a drunk man in his late 20s manoeuvres himself towards the bar with a dumb, determined look on his face. Upon realizing that he has interrupted a conversation between me and my friend, he quickly and silently runs through a range of emotions: mortified, apologetic, and finally welcoming. “Bonsoir,” he says with the widest eyes he can muster after hours of drinking. “Welcome to Quebec!” He reaches for the pitcher of beer in front of me, holds it up to observe its color, and pours its remnants into my glass. He nods at me, his bottom lip slinking away from his mouth in satisfaction at the good pour, holds both arms aloft, and shouts “Bon nuit!” And then he is gone.
This is a drunk man in Quebec. There are many like him, but this is one mine.
All of which is to say that this city must be one of the only places in the world in which one could organize an 11-day festival, complete with nine stages, without succumbing to dystopian, hungover chaos by the fifth day. Frankly, everyone here should be exhausted by now. Many of them are nine days deep at a the festival that’s featured Brad Pasiley, Ice Cube, Selena Gomez, Sting & Peter Gabriel, and almost a literal shit-load of other unspeakably big headliners. Four major outdoor stages and four indoor run all night and nothing really stops during the day, despite the lethargy and shame that late-night poutine should necessitate.
Of course, it’s easy to put all of this down to some sort of cliched French-Canadian tenacity, politeness, joie de vivre, delete as appropriate. But that would be to ignore the strange, incredibly simple quirks that keep the whole thing afloat.
This year, for the seventh year in a row, all 120,000 tickets to the festival sold out, but organizers figure that around two million people have attended the festival this year. Buy a pass to Le Festival d’été de Québec and you’ll receive ticket that you can pass on to as many people as you see fit. You want to go see Travis Scott but don’t care about the Rammstein show? Pass it along to your buddy.
Which, yeah, this makes for tourist heaven. Us Anglophones turn up, consume too much, get over-excited, and then leave singing the place’s praises. For a festival started with the express intention of advertising a city’s potential for tourism and trade, that’s hardly a surprise.
But on a small, local scale, that’s huge. Local businesses probably do great, the economy gets a boost or whatever, but goddamn can you imagine being a 15-year-old through this sort of thing? Hell, any age at all, but 15 really would rule. It’d be like the carnival rolling through town but instead of a shit magic show, you get Sting. You can hang out with your friends, make out with someone because you’re not exactly going to have the courage during the school year, and run around the streets of your hometown, all for an amount of money you could make from a moderately successful, vaguely offensive viral video.
This is a not-for-profit festival run like a private business; every penny that they make gets poured back into the next year’s festival. So the money they made off last year’s sets by Foo Fighters (!) and The Rolling Stones (!!) went back into booking Red Hot Chili Peppers this year. It’s painfully, criminally optimistic to imagine that festivals in the US would ever follow suit, at least without some genuine incentive. Festivals of this size and scale tend to be dominated by the touring cavalcade of mid-cycle acts who occupy the Michelob Ultra stage at Coachella or something. They’re often bankrolled by nothing more than corporate sponsorship and high-risk debt, and, to no great surprise, they go bust in a few years, only to be replaced by the same thing with a different name after a brief hiatus. SunSparkle Festival becomes MoonFest which in turn becomes CornTingle Open Air.
But here, in the middle of all the charm and prettiness, is a model for the sustainable, genuinely enjoyable, city-wide music festival: cheap tickets, reinvestment, locally-based organizers, and a modicum of respect for the city itself. That way, fedoras will once again retake their rightful place as acceptable headwear.
Alex Robert Ross is a writer based in Brooklyn. Follow him on Twitter.
