by LORRAINE CARPENTER

"Dude, these for-profit festivals, this elitist Pop fest, it's killing me. So on behalf of all the über-shit bands, I'm going to start the UN-POP FESTIVAL. That's right, Unpopular Montreal: It's gonna be three days, it's gonna be in the summer, we're gonna get as many bands together as we want and it's gonna be free! And I don't care if I take a FINANCIAL HIT because it's about time somebody balanced this shit out. We're gonna fuckin' take 'em on, baby!"

That was part of Nate Munn's call to the Mirror's Rant Line™ last April, when the Unpop Festival was born.

Roughly 25 years earlier, Munn was born in Ottawa. He says he was popular in high school. Then he started playing music that didn't fit the rigid moulds that rule the capital's music scene, and rejection loomed large. So he abandoned music, partied excessively, nearly lost his mind, and finally moved to Montreal in 2001. Munn figured this city was more accepting of eccentric musicality and had enough venues to accommodate its abundant talent. But popularity remained elusive.

"When I first got here, I was having real trouble getting shows," he says. "No one would hook me up, so I was like, ‘Fuck that, I have to play. I'll play in the street.'"

MC Versus plugs in

As MC Versus, Munn plugged in to outdoor outlets and introduced Montreal to Ghettonuns, a spastic rap act that didn't have too much trouble drawing crowds. To book his first proper venue, though, Munn was forced to "talk some trash" to get his foot in the door.

"I had to invent a manager," he says. "I called [a local venue] and I was like, ‘Hi, this is David Allen, I manage the Ghettonuns. This kid's wild, you've gotta check him out,' and they were like, ‘Yeah, send him by.'"

Finally, Munn was fitting in, generating some buzz, some support and some controversy for his various music projects: foul-mouthed acoustic duo the John School Dropouts, whose other half gained Rant Line™ infamy last winter for boasting about assaulting an audience member; punk rawkers the Black Watch and "crazy experimental rock 'n' roll" duo the Blanks, projects still too new to stir up much shit; and of course Ghettonuns, recently banned from Barfly for screaming at the staff and breaking a mic stand during a show ("I was just in a bad mood that day and I snapped - I wasn't planning to be an asshole," Munn says). Before long, however, he hit another hurdle on the road to recognition and respect: the festival circuit.

The no-selection process

Based on his rant, it would appear that Munn's nemesis is Pop Montreal, the four-day, late-September, alt-pop and indie rock festival founded in 2002. But the seeds for Unpop were actually planted by Munn's anger at another, similar festival, Toronto's North by Northeast.

"I applied to NXNE, sent in the kit, paid the $30. Then you wait. You wait and you wait. Then they start sending you ads: ‘Advertise with us;' ‘Have promo gear at other people's shows;' ‘Spend $400;' ‘Spend $700' - chunks of money. They try to entice you to buy all this shit, and then you finally get the real response, and of course they rejected me. I was so bummed. And once I saw the process for Pop Montreal, it was just the straw that broke the back. I was pissed off.

"They say, ‘Write us a letter explaining why you wanna play the festival.' Well, why do you think? We all wanna rock! What if some death metal bands writes, ‘Because we wanna conjure Satan'? Would that be cool enough for the ‘cool' club? I don't think so."

The first annual Unpop will feature 20 bands over four days at five venues, booked in a first-come, first served style. No registration, no judgement, no sponsors and, says Munn, "no bullshit - it's just a bunch of shows with a bunch of bands you never heard of. We can all hang out together in the not-cool club."

The quality of Unpop's line-up recently came into question in what the festival's Web site proudly proclaims is its first official piece of hate mail. It reads, in part, "You will fail. At least pick some good bands instead of shit bands. We got loads of fuckin' cool underground shit here. THINK ABOUT THESE THINGS YOU MORON !!!!" To which Munn replied, in what he describes as a "restrained, man-style demeanour," "Hello shit-for-brains. What don't you understand about NO selection process?"

"I haven't heard any of these bands' music," he explains. "Maybe an MP3 here and there, but quality control is up to the other festivals, you know what I mean? All I guarantee is rock 'n' roll and free shows, always free shows. That will never change."

Paying to play

Munn is already planning to make Unpop an annual event. Maybe next year there'll be more shows, a program, some local sponsors, maybe even some out-of-town headliners. But he says his basic rules will remain, even if he loses money as a result of the sometimes exorbitant rental fees charged by the majority of Montreal's venues.

But in his continuing quest for the unpopular crown, Munn goes against the socialist grain (and, to some degree, his own festival's spirit) by singing the praises of the much-maligned "pay to play" policy.

"There's those of us [for whom] it's our passion and there's those of us [for whom] it's a hobby, and there's nothing wrong with that. But I'll go without eating for a week in order to have the cash to put on a show, because the bar needs to make their money too. You can't have tons of shit bands playing around with nobody coming out and having fun. We all wanna go to shows and we want them to be good.

"I don't have anything against profit festivals and really good bands getting bigger and getting more exposure and playing bigger shows 'cause that's the natural order," he continues. "But there's got to be a space where it's just fun, it's just about everybody coming out to rock, fall off the stage, whatever. That's what got all of us into it in the first place, when we were 13, 14, and we went to punk rock shows and freaked out. Then you get older and the cynicism sets in, and I can't deal with the cynicism."

Munn doesn't claim to be God's gift to music, or a music expert or a savvy scenester. "To tell the truth, I rarely go to shows," he admits. "I don't really support the scene, but this is one little thing I can do to try and contribute," by giving some real rookies a little bit of exposure. Maybe one day some of those bands will be cool enough for Pop Montreal.

"The only thing that was cool," says Munn, when asked if he'd received any response from the people at Pop, "is that they put my rant on their Web site and titled it, ‘Pop Montreal receives its comeuppance.' I thought that was classy on their part. They could have taken it the wrong way and thought I was being vindictive, but it seems like they were kind of playing along. They're an amazing festival, they're huge and they bring wicked, wicked shows, but at the same time, they're the ‘cool' club, so fuck them."

Unpopular Montreal runs from Aug. 25–Aug. 28 at various venues. Check http://unpop.bravehost.com for details

>> Music Listings