September 12th, 2026
Music 4 Cancer: An Enduring Force of Hope
Music 4 Cancer totally crushed it’s 14th- yes, fourteenth!– official edition in Ste Thérèse, Québec this past weekend. Active since 2007, M4C is a one-of-a-kind, 2-day festival that fully dedicates itself to the cause of raising money and awareness for cancer.
This year, many bands performing at Quebec City’s ”Envol & Macadam” played at Music 4 Cancer. Both festivals have enjoyed a collaborative relationship for some time. What’s incredible, is that some bands playing on M4C’s Saturday schedule drove down immediately after their set in Quebec city, in order to play. This includes Guttermouth and Killing Daisies, the former delivering one of the most bonkers punk shows I’ve seen to date.
See Also: AC/DC at Jean Drapeau, Montreal
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the Vans Warped Tour.
It was, how shall I put it, a fine display of the moshing arts. Fine circle pits that respected the mathematical constraints of said primitive shapes, to violent hardcore death ovoids, where dancers artfully swung limbs of fury in creative ways. It took place on an island called Jean-Drapeau that plays host to cultural events without itself being a place of community and living.
Ste-Thérèse was another thing altogether. A modest town, I immediately felt the quaint atmosphere wash over me as I walked up one of its main arteries, towards it’s center. Over the course of the next 48 hours, I would become fascinated with the people I saw and the things I heard. Not to mention the Laval bro, trash compactor mosh pits.
M4C: Day 1
Contrarily to the Vans Warped Tour, Music 4 Cancer was a more down to earth festival. Waltzing around with a fresh, Friday afternoon energy level, I spoke to whomever I felt like. Though some people were surprised to speak to a wide eyes, portrait hungry stranger, everyone was chill. What’s more, is the beer was almost half the price of what those crooks running the Jean-Drapeau circuit charged.
Music 4 Cancer is clearly a family friendly event. However, the children present at M4C were a little, how shall we say, more on the feral side than their Warped Tour counterparts. Here, parents aren’t wearing Ciele caps and looking at me with concern as i bleed from my upper lip after receiving an accidental elbow to the mouth during Sublime. Here, the parents practically throw their kids into the swirling crowds.
In Ste-Thérèse, the adults are now the children. And I admit, I sometimes felt slightly at odds with this on several occasions.
I mean, a few kids sprinkled here in a festival are like moral buoys. They make you realize things like:
” Ah, maybe this isn’t a good place to take my pants off.”
Or,
”Maybe I’ll go sniff cocaine behind that tree or in that bathroom stall instead of by this 9 year old girl.”
Children mostly have a ”grounding” effect on adults. Mostly.
High speed reviews
Beginning at 4:30PM, Music 4 Cancer’s big weekend began with 2FAST4U, local Trois-Rivières skate punk nobility, who displayed their unmistakable brand of high energy speed punk.
Following this, the cover band 1994 gave us a valiant effort at interpreting one of my favorite albums, Propagandhi’s 1993 release, ”How To Clean Everything”. Overall, they did very well. Sort of. This angry, potent and passionate program of high tension rebellion written with a poetic prowess that only Chris Hannah could muster, is a masterpiece of Canadian punk. It was a real crowd pleaser.
From Antwerp, Belgium, For I Am softened things up with a much poppier sound. Celebrating their guitarist’s birthday on stage, at some point they broke out into ”Happy Birthday”, inviting the crowd to sing along…in English. Given that some Flemish would rather drink piss than speak French, I’m not surprised that they would ignore the local language preference to satisfy the birthday boy’s potential linguistical tastes. Somewhat reluctantly, the crowd obliged.
From that point on, Friday went into high gear with A Wilhelm Scream. The Wilhelm scream, as it’s known, is a stock sound effect allegedly voiced by a certain Sheb Wooley, though this has never been officially confirmed. A famous usage of the scream occurs when Boba Fett accidentally falls into the Sarlacc Pit in Return of the Jedi. In fact, all Star Wars movies made up until the year 2015 used this scream. Disney, being the factory of fun that it is, decided to do away with this tradition. I decided not to verify if Massachusetts’s own A Wilhelm Scream has ever used this infamous audio clip.
A Wilhelm Scream is very drama forward band with much speed. However, they never get Emo bothersome. A really great band to see live.
Satanic Surfers
Up next was Satanic Surfers, a band that embodies the words ”skate punk” like no other.
I assume they played a great set of fan favorites. I have to be honest here, I owned their first album ”Keep Out” and listened to it until the CD broke, memorizing every single word. But after that, I didn’t buy any other of their albums. This was not by any conscious choice, of course. After all my CD’s were robbed from my room in my first apartment that I shared with a friend and his dad, I couldn’t bring myself to buy music for many years. Satanic Surfers aren’t the Einsteins of punk rock with all their talk of farts and masturbating, but they sure as hell play a great show.
A highlight for me, was when they played ”Keep Out”, a song about telling fascists to fuck off.
However, it’s during the Satanic Surfers est that I noticed a few off things about Ste-Thérèse mosh pits. They’re a frozen in time, violent testosterone soup.
Now, I’m not complaining, I go to the gym and can handle my own, take hundreds of hits and my reflexes are quite decent. I’m able to have my eyes spot the wackos and their wild elbows faster than most, but this pit was off it’s hinges with muscular dudes smashing into everyone.
With age, I still see the pit as a crazy, twisty, fast paced place where I can go bonkers, run around in circles, falling down and get hit a million times. On the other hand, it’s also for everyone. And that means watching out for those around you. The Satanic Surfers pit, at least for the first half of the show, was surprisingly my most mindlessly aggressive pit of the year.
Bad Religion
And then, from somewhere in my bright, subconscious mind came Bad Religion.
Like the prelude to a state of war, the stage light went from nothing to a troubling, red hue. Greg Graffin, Jay Bentley, Mike Dimkich and Jamie Miller stepped on stage, the evening’s guests of honor basking in the crowd’s adulative release.
In this state of semi-darkness, the show began. The first song of the evening was the powerful and ever relevant ”Recipe for Hate” taken off their 1993 album by the same name.
Clearly enjoying themselves, Bad Religion were in top form. Playing songs from their many classic albums, they visited every era of their career. An illustrious collection of music spanning about 44 years!
Throughout the night, we would hear such old school favorites as ”Fuck Armageddon, This is Hell” and ‘We’re Only Gonna Die”. And frankly, who can’t ”21st Century Digital Boy” from top to bottom? The hits kept rolling during the entirety of their hour and a half long set. It would hard to imagine Bad Religion set without the practically mainstream classics ”21st Century Digital Boy” and ‘American Jesus”. The band’s consistency in lyrical quality and musical composition is almost unmatched.
Songs from their 2000s era releases such as ”True North”, ”Sorrow” and ”Fuck You” were played to a crowd of enthralled fans.
During the song ”A walk” taken from the album ”The Gray Race”, the band seemed to be having the time of their lives, laughing. Well, to be fair, the band’s lifelong bassist Jay Bentley was pretty much smiling during the whole show. It was at this point that Graffin jokingly exclaims that he’s blown his voice out, undoubtedly signifying that our evening’s festivities would be coming to an abrupt end. With the crowd in a state of emotional limbo, they immediately started one of the most haunting songs of their repertoire, ”You”.
Bad Religion, to myself and many others, is not only a band but one of the first glimpses into a world of reason and critical thinking. When you’re 15 years old, angry at the World around you, hungry for explanations to questions you haven’t the emotional intelligence to formulate, there isn’t much that can help you assuage the pain of growing up like music does. And then, you discover the potent powers of a band like Bad Religion. Reading the lyric sheets, you reflect, realize and wonder. The very melodies of their songs make you pause, inquire and dissect.
Bad Religion is a electrode shock to the young, inquisitive mind and should be mandatory listening for all teenagers. Their songs are the footnotes of my adolescence and still have a profoundly positive effect on me to this day.
Read More:
>> Angine de Poitrine at Minotaure, Gatineau
>> Journey at Bell Center, Montreal
>> Live at Place Bell, Laval
After Bad Religion ended their set, crowds of super heated particles evaporated into the streets, the festival grounds slowly slipping into a a quiet state of slumber. And thus, Music 4 Cancer’s Friday evening came to an end.
Day 2 would prove to be even crazier.
