April 12, 2005

Rapper and teacher

All the Fairview homies, the Albion, the Highland Park, the Garibaldi and the Maple Ridge homies, they were all down with Etienne. And they don't play around.

If you stink, they'll tell you. If your rhymes are wack, they'll let you know.

Etienne, which translates into Steven in French, gyrated his hips and maneuvered his lips in a way that made all the girls scream. Even the boys let loose.

"I love your towel," yelled several different girls.

The pink, purple and turquoise beach towel played the role of handkerchief at the beginning of the show and graduated into a bath robe of sorts by the time Etienne finished.

There are very few performers who sweat as much as Etienne but it goes with the territory when your game is keeping young kids interested. It's gotta be high energy when you're an edu-rocker.

Keeping them interested all the way through an hour-long performance is tough. Who wouldn't be skeptical if their teacher told them they'd be listening to a French rapper from Windsor Ontario?

He's even been dubbed by media as the children's version of Eminem, but only because of his skin colour.

Although it's nothing but a nice floury lie to think that these students Etienne - aka Steven Langlois - is performing for aren't familiar with the violent, over-the-top lyrics of mainstream rappers, they all seem to appreciate what he's about.

"Kids like the fact that I have that edge," said Langlois. "They come to the show expecting some guy sitting on a stool."

After one of his shows in West Philadelphia, Langlois was told by a teacher that the kids were blown away his show.

"To them you're as cool as Snoop Dogg and Notorious BIG, and these kids know their rap," said the teacher.

An Etienne show is all about interacting with the audience. Mostly it's high-fiving the kids or getting the crowd to jump around but sometimes he throws in a little something for the teachers.

On Tuesday he performed in Burnaby and as usual he did a tribute to the Backstreet Boys, a sappy, French love song that at a normal show would make even the most romantic woman hurl.

Only this time he was invited onto the lap of a teacher who decided that she was going to be the one making the moves. He played along for a few seconds of awkward intimacy but then cut the act and went back to the show.

That must have been kind of nice, right?

"Personally, no," said Langlois. "But I would never tell her that."

Langlois is a happily married man with two kids who has taken a sabbatical from his teaching job at Herman Secondary in Windsor to embark on a world tour as Etienne.

The tour started in the beginning of February and will end in August with stops in New Zealand and Australia.

Although he's sold tens of thousands of CDs in three languages - English, French and Spanish - and admits he could have left his teaching job two years into it (financially speaking), he's been able to balance both the music and the classroom work.

After all, the two go hand-in-hand.

The 34-year-old Langlois, is a trained vocalist (Royal Conservatory) who has been singing for most of his life. He started using his music as a teaching tool back in teacher's college and now that he's taught for 12 years he still uses music to educate his students.

Grammar, verb conjunction, prefixes, suffixes, adjectives, vowels, he teaches it all through music. But not all the time.

"Contrary to what people may believe, I don't use music all the time," said Langlois.

His music has been recognized by the Canadian Music Week Indies Awards - he won favorite children's artist last year and won children's album of the year in 2003.

And apparently he's also changed a few lives, or so he's been told. Although he uses the comments on his promotional kit, he laughs after pondering the thought.

"God can change your life," said Langlois. "I don't know about some French educational rapper."

We'll just say he's good at what he does.