Week of December 15, 2005, Issue #530
MUSIC
Weapons ready
By Ross Moroz
Edmonton is undeniably a rock ‘n’ roll town. Tired, decrepit old
Can-rock dinosaurs who couldn’t get booked into a one-room pub in the
least fashionable part of Toronto play sold-out shows here with alarming regularity;
every suburban teenager from St. Albert to Sherwood Park seems to have his own
punk or emo band; and local journalists boast about how excitingly on-the-verge
E-town’s indie-rock scene is until they’re blue in the face. So
upon hearing that an up-and-coming Edmonton musician’s new album has garnered
glowing reviews from sources as disparate as Pitchfork and the Globe and Mail
and will be featured on the cover of an upcoming issue of Macleans magazine,
it would be fair to naïvely assume that one of our city’s scruffy
hipster guitarists had finally struck it big, rather than realizing that it
is, in fact, local rap phenom Cadence Weapon that has the continent’s
music press all abuzz.
Cadence Weapon, a.k.a. 19-year-old Garneau resident Rollie Pemberton, has just
released his first full-length, Breaking Kayfabe, on Toronto’s Upper Class
Recordings, and hyperbolistic accolades have been pouring in from across North
America (as of yet, no review has been lower than four stars). Not bad for a
kid who just started rapping seriously in the last three years, and who somewhat
unbelievably continues to call the hip-hop black hole that is Edmonton his home
base.
“That’s the number one question: why do I still live here?”
Pemberton laughs over a beer at the Sugarbowl, just steps from his home near
the university campus. “Because I like it here. Why should I have to move?
I feel like in this day and age you can do anything on the internet. That’s
how I initially got signed, actually; someone put a song of mine on a blog and
a label contacted me because of that.”
For Pemberton, the idea of having to move to a larger centre to pursue a serious
career in music is largely obsolete. “It’s so easy to get your music
out there from anywhere, and if I need to go to Toronto or New York for something,
it’s not that hard to get there. I’ve lived in Edmonton my entire
life, and I see no reason to change who I am or where I’m from just because
I happen to be successful,” he insists, noting that he sees the prevailing
opposite attitude as not only misguided but even detrimental. “I feel
like the reason there isn’t a solid, cohesive Edmonton scene is because
until recently anyone who becomes successful here moves away, which is totally
counterproductive to creating a scene.”
And that scene, however heteroclite and incohesive, is something Pemberton credits
for his music’s notable diversity and individuality: in a hip-hop world
divided between catchy but vacuous commercial tripe and intelligent if totally
inaccessible underground esotericism, Pemberton’s rap is lauded for its
mix of smart, introspective subject matter with floor-filling hooks and infectious
beats.
“Edmonton’s music scene is totally different than anywhere else,
in that it’s more of a melting-pot situation; for instance I find myself
far more aligned with a lot of indie rockers than with the rap crowd, so I have
a bit of that sensibility,” he agrees. “I’ve been saying forever
that the difference between underground hip-hop and commercial hip-hop is tunefulness
and pop sensibility, which are important to all music. Underground rappers complain
that mainstream hip-hop is too one-dimensional—you know, it’s all
about girls, cars, money, stuff like that—but the thing is, they’re
only rapping about how much they hate those guys, so they’re guilty of
the same thing, really. So I’d kind of like to bridge the gap there; I’d
like to rap about things that matter, but I’d like to make music that
you could play in a club and dance to.”
In Pemberton’s mind, this is why his music has somewhat surprisingly managed
to catch on with the people more inclined to listen to Death From Above than
Death Row. “I think maybe the indie-rock crowd likes my music because
the more thugged-out rap doesn’t appeal to them at all—if anything,
it kind of threatens their ideals and what they believe in. And the underground
rap is just so tuneless and hard to listen to,” he speculates. “I
feel like I’m in the middle: I still have the pop accessibility, but I
bring some depth to it, and I think people really understand that. I’ve
never really heard another rapper combine the different elements that I work
with.”
It also doesn’t hurt to rap about things most Edmontonians are familiar
with in a much less metaphorical way: unlike many young rappers who feel the
need to proselytize about gangster-worthy tales of murder and violence even
if they’ve never been exposed to such experiences, Pemberton is known
for rapping about the Black Dog, New City and ETS busses, and this local flavour
apparently appeals to non-Edmontonians, too.
“I think people appreciate the honesty, even if they have no idea what
these things are,” he says. “It’s the same idea as grime from
the UK. It’s very culturally specific: they’re using slang that
no one understands, but it feels like you’re being let in on a secret
or learning something about this totally different world, and people like that—it’s
like reading a novel, in that you’re being taken to a different place.”
Apparently he’s on to something—so far, the increasingly diverse
group of people who have been exposed to Breaking Kayfabe have nothing but praise
for the intensely listenable album. So if everyone from rap elitists from Toronto
to cynical hipsters from Edmonton can dig Cadence Weapon, will stereotypical
Macleans and Globe and Mail readers, too?
“That’s the plan,” Pemberton laughs. “Hopefully a bunch
of people will read Macleans at the doctor’s office and end up buying
my album. I’ll let you know.” V
Cadence Weapon
With the Vertical Struts • The Velvet Underground • Sat, Dec
17