Back when I lived in Montréal in my twenties, we often used to hang out by the train tracks. We’d cut a hole in the fence and burst out into the great wide open. Once on the other side, we’d climb huge piles of rubble, drink big bottles of beer and make little films with our cameras. One time, I hopped the fence and caught my hand on a jagged exposed wire. My friend Agor ran off and returned with rubbing alcohol to sterilize my wound. I still have the scar.
That was a typical scene from the early 2010s. My days were unstructured and unburdened by traditional labour. And when I did work, it was solely on my art. Yesterday, I spoke at the Mayor’s Cultural Summit in Toronto about how to protect a city’s music scene from the encroaching wave of gentrification. One tool is affordable housing; in my Mile End days, I paid $400 a month for rent. I could knock that out with a few DJ sets, leaving ample time for making music.
Cheap rent allowed our scene to galvanize around a small area in Outremont:
All living within these few blocks at the same time were myself, Jane Penny and David Carriere from TOPS, Grimes, Mac DeMarco, Agor Cowan from Blue Hawaii, Arbutus Records founder Sebastian Cowan, painter Ezra Gray, cinematographer Evan Prosofsky, editor-in-chief of Editorial Magazine Claire Milbrath and many others. Our scene had reached critical mass and soon after, the world would take notice.
In hyper-optimized 2026, it is nearly impossible to describe the singularly languorous pace of life back then. It sounds unreal. For a taste of what it felt like back then, go see Mile End Kicks in theatres. Chandler Levack’s semi-autobiographical film follows hapless Toronto ex-pat Grace Pine (Barbie Ferreira) as she descends upon Montréal’s Mile End in 2011, vainly hoping to write a 33 1/3 book about Jagged Little Pill by Alanis Morissette.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you see it) for Grace and many kids who arrive from the ROC (rest of Canada), Montréal is a pleasurable vortex, a patch of quicksand shaped like one big loft party. I had to laugh at the idea of moving there to complete a project. It’s a city that dares you to look away.
They say to write what you know and Levack could only possibly play the role of the interloper. Even within the anglophone music scene in her days as a music journalist, Chandler was easily marked as an outsider, paradoxically making her the perfect person to document the scene with some remove.
Even at the time I was in the middle of the “Montréal is the new Brooklyn” maelstrom, I felt that someone should document what was happening. It truly did feel like we were living inside of a movie. I tried to capture some of the spirit of the time in my memoir Bedroom Rapper (the paperback edition just dropped this month!) and check out A City is an Island by Berlin-based Australian filmmaker Tim Kelly for a documentarian’s eye on the same scene. I’m featured in it rapping a cappella and walking around the neighbourhood.
Montrealers know how amazing their culture is and are fiercely protective of it. They hate to be misrepresented. I was sent an early script of this film when it had the working title Anglophone. I made some notes, one of which was as follows:
As a fellow outsider inspired by the dream logic of an unbelievably inspiring city, I believe that Chandler did our particular scene justice from her perspective. Grace Pine's intentionally myopic view of the Mile End as a mere cinematic backdrop for her romantic misadventures, while largely ignoring the Jewish, Francophone and other diverse communities of the neighbourhood, is likely an accurate depiction of how a self-absorbed young Torontonian might see things.
Attending the world premiere of the film at TIFF last fall was an experience unlike any other. The instant familiarity of the locations, the simulated loft parties, the poetry readings by the train tracks, the nostalgic music (my song “Hype Man” can be briefly heard in the background of a scene)… it was like watching a bizarro version of my twenties being acted out in front of me:
No one person could ever capture the totality of what Montréal has to offer on film. Many have tried, few have succeeded, most have failed. The curious thing about the city is that it means something different to everyone, but simultaneously has an undeniably distinct feel that might be more clearly articulated by native Montrealers. It’s unlike anywhere else in the world. Anyone who has lived there is likely to spend the rest of their days singing its praises. Or at least make some art about it.
My new album Forager is out this Friday!
You can find me updating my playlists or hanging on TikTok, Instagram and Bluesky. You can listen to my music on Apple Music, Bandcamp and Spotify. You can get Cadence Weapon merchandise here. Pick up your copy of Bedroom Rapper here and please rate it on Goodreads.
Scroll beyond the paywall to listen to a 2 hour long recording of my DJ set from the Mile End Kicks TIFF party at Ace Hotel Toronto.
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