by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

“Those are the two poles that everything revolves around,” says Vincent Couture of Royal Air Togo, blithely ignoring his remark’s stripclub allusion, all too appropriate to the often sleazy and always cheesy global sounds he and his associates, Marie-Christine Quenneville and Laurent Lussier, deploy at their parties (on Jan. 26, they begin their new monthly night at Zoobizarre).

Since their first soirée, at Divan Orange just short of two years ago, the trio have made it their mission to showcase the lowbrow side of world music, the stuff that’s fun, dumb, cheap and entirely unlikely to end up on a Starbucks compilation. As Quenneville explains, “We would always name things like Cesaria Evora, Buena Vista Social Club and Peter Gabriel as the opposite of the world music we want to listen to and play.”

Initially an exploration of retro rock ’n’ roll from around the globe—Cambodian, Mexican, Turkish, Ethiopian—Royal Air Togo’s playlists now include Brazilian baile funk and Balkan turbofolk, Ukrainian rap and African electro-pop, “speed cha-cha” and “bhangra à gogo.”

“We don’t have this very precise subject or style,” says Couture. “We look everywhere in the world, every era, vertical and horizontal.” It’s material they and friends have gathered during travels, or in local immigrant neighbourhoods—“It’s way better than the Internet,” says Quenneville, “much more fun, much more real, and we get the pastries and the clothes together with the music.”

Royal Air Togo’s overall sensibility, according to Couture, could be summarized in the person of Borat-esque crooner Romeo Fantastik. “When our friend lived in Romania, he got that CD from a taxi driver. The picture is this moustachioed guy with fake porn stars next to him, and he mixes pop with Romanian traditional music. It’s a bit cheap but super catchy.”

Fantastik’s CD cover, with notso- subliminal messages like “sex and music” crudely photoshopped onto his clothes, suggests that subtlety isn’t his priority. It sure isn’t for Guadeloupe’s Francky Vincent, another of the trio’s frequent flyers. “Like Romeo, he plays the sex card. His songs are all about sex, or constipation, shit—‘I ate too much guava, now I’m constipated.’ He plays in a zouk style—”

“But the way he brings his topics is really funny,” adds Quenneville, “and so different from what we Westerners understand about world music.”

Likewise, Thai-flavoured hulahoop contests and Tibetan dancealong karaoke sessions are hardly par for the course at your average globally oriented club night. “One of the things about our parties is, we aren’t just DJs who don’t talk to anyone. We organize contests and things—we’ve always imagined ourselves more like wedding MCs, something a little cheesy, dressing up a little bit. The dream would be to have a cold buffet on the side.”

Royal Air Togo are gripped by the occasional socio-political misgiving— is that Serbian sexpot an ultranationalist? Would Tibetan pop with Chinese lyrics be kosher for the Dalai Lama and his posse?—but in the end, their attitude is, take the stuff at face value (like the old novelty- gimmick ads say, “for entertainment purposes only”). “I don’t feel obliged to educate people,” says Quenneville. “I feel more that this is the reality, and we show it as it is.”

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