For Vancouver’s Missy D, music is a way to communicate, no matter what the language
The rapper and singer performs at Alliance Française Vancouver’s annual Fête de la Musique, alongside Kaya Ko, Alpha Yaya Diallo, Phantom Jungle, and many other eclectic acts
(Left to right) Kaya Ko (photo by Alice Guevarra), Missy D, and Alpha Yaya Diallo (photo by Alistair Eagle) are set to perform at Alliance Française’s Fête de la Musique.
Alliance Française Vancouver hosts Fête de la Musique on June 21 from 2 pm to 9 pm
FOR ANY ARTIST, realizing that there’s a whole new audience just waiting to discover your work can be one of the most gratifying parts of living the creative life. Rapper and singer Missy D, for instance, has spent much of the past two years bringing her songs to a fan base that she never foresaw. The Vancouver-based performer has been touring the country, playing to school groups and children’s festival crowds.
“I’m sharing a little bit of my story about learning English through music, and how I’m how bilingual now,” explains the emcee, who was born in Rwanda and lived in Côte d’Ivoire and Zimbabwe before coming to Canada. “Sometimes music can do things to help you learn something new.”
Missy D, whose first language was French, certainly never set out to be a children’s entertainer—or a professional musician of any kind, really. “I first started doing music on the stage in French when I was a young kid at around 11,” she tells Stir in a telephone interview. “It sort of evolved as my hobby, and I never thought I would be doing this full-time. Then, when I moved to Vanouver, while I was learning English, while I was going to school at UBC, I wanted to write more music in English, so I sort of dabbled more in that art form. It was my way to communicate. Music is truly universal. It was my way to learn a language. My way to connect with people, my way to build a community, was through music.”
Missy D graduated from UBC in 2015 with a bachelor’s degree in life sciences, earth and environmental sciences, and statistics. The following year, she released her debut album, When Music Hits You Feel No Pain. True to its title, that LP bubbled over with uplifting and empowering jams; from the jazzy shuffle of the title track to the trap-leaning “Too Many Feelings”, the artist’s smooth-flowing bars marked her as one to watch.
It’s worth noting that almost all of the lyrics are in English. Missy D flipped that script with the full-length follow-up, 2022’s Case Départ, which is primarily in French, as have been most of the tracks on her more recent singles and EPs.
“In 2022, after the pandemic, after everything sort of re-shifted, I think a lot of us went into this sort of reflection mode of ‘Why do we do what we do?’” Missy D says. “I started to think back to where it all started, and how music has been this constant in my life, and I was like, ‘Hey, I haven’t been writing in French in a long time.’ So I decided to go back to the start, which is why the project’s called Case Départ, which is like ‘starting block’.”
Missy D notes that she kept her French lyrics fairly simple so that her anglophone friends in Vancouver would be able to understand them more easily. This had the unforeseen effect of also making the songs more easily accessible to younger listeners, even if that was never the goal.
Some of those songs wound up in Manie Musicale, an international competition in which students and teachers of French try to predict which of 16 francophone songs will be the most popular through several rounds of voting. This is what brought Missy D’s music to the attention of educators, and soon enough invitations to perform for schoolchildren started to pour in.
“What’s funny is that I never wrote this music for kids,” the rapper-singer says. “For sure, the show that I was touring around, the storytelling was geared more to that audience, but the songs that I perform are the same ones that I perform for adults. I just sort of do a different version. If I’m looking at an audience that’s under Grade 3, then maybe I do a little less wordy raps, a little more choruses, and that kind of stuff.”
Missy D will be free to use her full vocabulary on June 21 when she performs on the theatre stage of Alliance Française Vancouver as part of its annual Fête de la Musique—although there may very well be some kids in attendance, since it’s an all-ages event.
The afternoon of free music across three stages includes a concert by international artists-in-residence Alpha Yaya Diallo, Deo Munyakazi, Reza Abaee, and Ensemble Absinthe, as well as performances by Cedar & Sage Dancers, North Shore indie rockers Grade School, R&B chanteuse Kaya Ko, eclectic funk global-duo Phantom Jungle, and marimba-led ensemble Robin Lane & the Rhythm Makers, plus DJ sets from Lil Cis and DJ Staniml.
Missy D will also be hitting the stages of the Vancouver International Jazz Festival this month and the Harrison Festival of the Arts in July. Beyond those gigs, though, don’t expect to see much of her this summer, as she plans to spend most of it working on a new album.
“I’ve done a lot of shows this past year, so this summer I’m kind of going back into the lab,” she says. “I’m not doing as many shows. I’m more focusing on the writing and the recording of this album, then working on the year-long rollout and the work behind the scenes that goes into building an album—applying for grants, and that kind of thing.”
Missy D doesn’t reveal too many details of what she has in the works, but she will allow that she’s switching gears again, linguistically speaking.
“In the last few months I’ve been writing more songs in English, for some reason,” she says. “It’s interesting. I’ve been doing a lot of French shows, and I’m back writing in English. So we’ll see what comes up.”
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