Lots of people have mentioned Celine Dion, and I'll post the Celine Dion song that drives me and so many people here in the French-Canadian world, insane. Needless to say, since I'm in a lower-class French-Canadian neighborhood, the Celine Dion that we listen to here is a very different, very Catholic, Celine Dion, one who regularly sings anthems to traditional Catholic life and values.
Her most famous anthem to traditional Catholic Quebecois society is a song called "Dégénérations" that she regularly sings with a traditionalist group called Mes Aieux (My Ancestors). It's a scathing critique of modern secular Quebec and a call for a return to the traditional Catholic ways of the past. There are countless videos on YouTube of her performing it with Mes Aieux on YouTube. I'll include one here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9UYaWVOarM
The song is sung in the joual dialect, which is the extremely coarse dialect of French spoken among the lower-class French in the neighborhood that I live in as well as throughout the Western part of Quebec. Here's a translation. Reading the lyrics might help give everybody outside of the French Catholic world a little sense of what traditional French Catholic life here is about:
Degenerations
Your great-great-grandfather, he cleared the land
Your great-grandfather, he plowed the land
And your grandfather made the land profitable
And your father sold it to become a civil servant
As for you, my boy, you don't know what you're gonna do
In your small one bedroom way too expensive, cold in the winter
Someone wants to become your owner
And you dream at night of owning a small plot of land
Your great-great-grandmother, she had fourteen children
Your great-grandmother had almost as many
And your grandmother had three, it was enough
And your mother didn't want any ; you were an accident
As for you, my girl, you change partner all the time
When you do something stupid, you get out of it with an abortion
But there are mornings, you wake up crying
When you dream at night of a big table surrounded by kids
Your great-great-grandfather, lived in misery
Your great-grandfather, collected pennies
And your grandfather - miracle! - became a millionaire
And your father inherited it and put it all in his RRSPs
As for you, young one, you owe your ass to the government
No way to get a loan in a banking institution
To calm your urges to hold-up the cashier
You read books about voluntary simplicity
Your great-great-grandparents, the knew how to celebrate
Your great-grandparents were swingning hard at parties
And your grandparents saw the ye-ye period
Your parents were discos, that's where they met
As for you my friend, what do you do with your evening ?
Just turn off your TV ; you shoudn't stay inside
Luckily in life some things refuse to change
Put on your nicest clothes because tonight we're going dancing!
The song's contemptuous representation of modern urban Quebecers as degenerates revolts me and the song makes my skin crawl unlike any other Celine Dion. Its romanticized fantasy of old Catholic Quebec nauseates me like nothing else.
