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Nova Scotia-born rapper Buck 65. (Warner Music Canada)

Rapper Buck 65 has long been preoccupied with anti-social folk: his gritty narratives are peopled with shifty salesmen, luckless drifters, grifters and assorted weirdoes. But a couple of years ago, the Nova Scotia-born rapper became obsessed with a different sort of malcontent: Guy Debord. A central figure in the Situationist International, a clutch of Marxist radicals centred in Paris in the ’50s and ’60s, Debord was a genuine revolutionary.

Sickened by capitalism and social propriety, the aim of the Situationists was to cause upheaval — or, at the very least, pull off some really saucy pranks. Nostalgic for the 19th-century anarchists, the Situationists believed in the primacy of art over work; they published satirical pamphlets and created films and comics. The Situationists were influential in the May ’68 riots in Paris, a confluence of student strikes and labour protests that brought president Charles De Gaulle’s government to heel. May ’68 is viewed as a defining moment in France’s movement from a conservative, religious society to a liberal one.

“I just became fascinated with this whole movement, and I was curious to know about the environment that gave rise to it,” says Buck, a.k.a. Rich Terfry, during a recent interview. Like many self-styled revolutionaries, the Situationists were ultimately too intractable to remain unified; by the early ’70s, Debord and Raoul Vaneigem, another major player, were publicly dissing each other for corrupting the cause. Situationist ideals have nonetheless been influential, inspiring everyone from the Sex Pistols to the Weather Underground, the ’60s American dissidents who sought to overthrow the U.S. government.

The Situationist International was born in the year 1957, which soon became the leitmotif for Buck’s new album, Situation.

“It’s maybe the most important year in history — certainly in the West, but maybe for the whole world,” Terfry says. “Even 50 years later, it might be too soon for us to have full perspective on that.” Unquestionably, it was a year of radical ideas, including the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong’s push to industrialize China; On the Road, Jack Kerouac’s great Beat novel; rock ‘n’ roll, which was bursting into the mainstream; and the Soviet Union’s launch of the Sputnik satellite, a feat of science and a Cold War provocation. “There was this shift taking place,” Terfry says. “A lot of people were thinking the same way: I’m bored, let’s shake things up here, let’s do things differently.”

The comparison is a touch breezy, given the terrible human cost of Mao’s revolution. But postwar tensions and a profound social conservatism created the conditions for radical expression.

(Warner Music Canada)

Situation isn’t agitprop so much as an impressionistic take on a portentous era. As with all of Buck’s albums, the songs on Situation are wry character studies, delivered with Terfry’s inimitable voice, a rasping growl that evokes Tom Waits and Rowlf the Dog. Here you’ll find sleazy gangsters (The Rebel), debauched policemen (Cop Shades, Heatwave), even an homage to ’50s pinup queen Bettie Page (Shutter Buggin’). The Beatific distils the seditious mood of the Beat writers: “We’re casualties, gradually, wreaking havoc / picking spots, connect the dots / no such thing as second thoughts / representative of new truth / evidence hardly darker / cycles and currents / disciples of Charlie Parker.”

Buck’s last record was Secret House Against the World, an elusive indie-rock foray. Full of loping beats, gritty basslines and horn samples, Situation returns Buck to his forte: hardboiled hip hop.

“It really has a lot to do with working with this Skratch Bastid kid, my friend Paul. It was bound to be a hip-hop album when we got together,” Terfry says. “It just so happened that writing a very impersonal record that was inspired by these events 50 years ago — making a very stripped-down hip-hop record made perfect sense.”

Terfry is famously nomadic, and recently spent a couple of years living in Paris with French singer Claire Berest, who appeared on Secret House Against the World. (Terfry has since moved to Toronto… but is planning to head back to Paris… with likely stints in Denver… The man is hard to pin down.) Terfry is wary of romanticizing historical events, but living in Paris made him appreciate the hold that the Situationist legacy still has on the French imagination.

“[The Situationists] were the driving force behind the May ’68 riots in Paris, and they sort of set the tone for the culture of protest there forever. Every week [in Paris], something pops up and people start whispering about May ’68 all over again,” Terfry reports.

A recent analogue is the mutiny in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois in the fall of 2005, when two teenage boys were accidentally electrocuted in a power substation after being chased by police. The neighbourhood is largely made up of poor immigrants from North Africa, and the tragedy prompted widespread rioting, looting and fires.

On Nov. 9, 2005, then-president Jacques Chirac announced a state of emergency. Although the deaths of the two youths were seen as the trigger, the unrest was the result of a long-simmering resentment in the community due to high unemployment and police harassment — ultimately, an inability to fully integrate into French society. 

In the midst of that strife, Claire Berest’s mother was attacked on the street. The incident angered Terfry, but it also gave him some unexpected insight. “When [protest] escalates and gets violent, as much as that might be scary to some people, I think at heart, all French people kind of love it — even when you become a victim. It’s unfortunate when you get hurt and your car gets destroyed. I think even someone like Claire’s mother, who is a university professor, I don’t think she was pleased that her car got destroyed, but I think she still supported the protest and philosophically didn’t have a problem with it.”

Situation is in stores now.

Andre Mayer writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.

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