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>> Amid building buzz for his sophomore effort, Afterparty Babies, Edmonton MC/producer Cadence Weapon talks about growing up weird and getting ahead in the loaded game of Canadian hip hop

SUBVERTIN’ ALBERTAN: Rollie Pemberton

by SCOTT C

Ever since Rollie Pemberton, aka Cadence Weapon, emerged from his hometown Edmonton in 2006 with his debut LP, Breaking Kayfabe, the accolades for this 22-year-old rapper/producer have been piling up to the sky.

As the son of DJ Teddy Pemberton, the man cited with pioneering hip hop on Edmonton radio waves through his CJSR radio show, The Black Experience in Sound, Pemberton has definitely done his late father proud. With all eyes on him, the critics have been eating up Cadence Weapon’s new album, Afterparty Babies, where four-on-the-floor party rap, atypical beats and sly delivery combine to flashback to the hazy days of Pemberton’s youth crew adventures during Edmonton’s summer of 2006.

With Afterparty Babies now distributed by Big Dada in the U.K. and Epitaph in the U.S., this former Pitchfork writer is working all the angles and touring like a beast. When he’s not ripping his pants onstage in the heat of a live show, this real-life college dropout can be found grinding like there’s no tomorrow. The Mirror spoke to Pemberton over the phone from St. John’s, Newfoundland.

Mirror: One of my biggest peeves with people making rap music today hinges on the idea that true originality has taken a backseat to accessibility. Do you make a decided effort to stand apart when you’re in create mode, or does it happen all by itself?

Rollie Pemberton: I feel that, as a result of the kind of music I was making, something eventually had to give when it finally did come out. I don’t want to say I’m totally surprised by the props I get for breaking down barriers, because I feel like there are a lot of people doing it right now—just not over here. I don’t know. I’ve always kind of been a weird guy, in everything I do, and it’s no different in the music I make. Whenever I would show it to people, they never really knew what to make of it, but now I think it’s becoming more accepted. It’s funny to hear “Sharks,” which I thought was so weird, being used as a bumper for MuchMusic. Who knew?

Mixed “Messages”

M: When you say you’ve always been a weird guy, what do you mean by that?

RP: Even in high school, I was the only guy into underground rap. I dressed differently. I’ve always been into different kinds of media, and just in general, things were weird. I just learned how to ride a bike last summer, and I don’t know how to swim. I didn’t have the same traditional upbringing as a lot of people, because my dad used to grow weed in the basement.

M: So did you have more friends than the average dude, or did you have no friends at all, as a result?

RP: Nobody really knew about it, actually.

M: I’m sure it was on the hush.

RP: Yep. Any friends I had, though, would always want to get rides from school, just because my dad was a really cool guy. They’d want to like, hang out with my dad and not me. I think I’ve recently started getting cool.

M: How does it feel to see something that you’ve essentially made for yourself going through the meat grinder of blogs, music journalists and critical hype? For someone like you, with a journalism background, it’s got to be a trip.

RP: Yeah. Most definitely. I often wonder what aspect of what I’m doing that people actually like so much—

M: Or if they actually understand.

RP: Right. Do they even get what I’m saying? Like, I’ll read a review that refers to a line I wrote as really dope, but do they think it’s dope for the same reasons that I do? For example, on the song “Messages Matter,” I started it off with the line, “When I spit, the words they glisten, ’cause where I spit, the birds they listen…” Now, I’m talking about a graffiti writer in Edmonton called Listen, who has stuff all over town with birds and word bubbles that say Listen. If you’re not from Edmonton, you obviously wouldn’t know that, right? But this journalist from London, England was like, “I love it! The birds, they listen,” thinking I was talking about the girls, but that’s not what I meant at all. If people like it, though, I’m not going to fault them for not having complete comprehension.

M: Well, that’s it, right? Once you put it out there, you have no control over how people will digest the finished product.

RP: Yeah, you definitely lose control over the meaning of it. When people buy it and listen to it on their own terms, they essentially take on a new life for it, and I think that’s good and very important.

Two rules and a Guelph fool

M: I’ve heard my share of moaning and groaning from Canadian rappers who complain about how hard it is to accomplish anything in this country, and many of the core complaints are warranted, but you seem to have sidestepped all of that and made your own path. What chapter would you write in the book, How to Make Music in Canada and Survive?

RP: My chapter would be called “Be Original.” That might be the problem in a lot of cases. Some people can be around for 10 or 20 years, making records and shit, and it’s the same record every time. Just because you’ve been around for a while does not make you a vet. There’s this weird sort of sense of entitlement that a lot of Canadian rappers have that’s just kind of irritating. People should want to push themselves to the next level and get their records on TV, in stores and outside of their city.

Maybe people aren’t really driven. When I was coming up, I was doing multiple shows in Edmonton every month, like crazy, which was, in retrospect, over-saturation, but I was trying really hard. I put out this mixtape and was slangin’ it hard, pushing for reviews, sending it overseas, really trying to get people to listen to it. I really took advantage of the Internet when people were like, “What’s a blog?” and that was kind of an advantage I had. I’d seen bands from other countries break just from popularity on blogs. You know, a small group of people grabbing on to a record, wanting to tell everyone they know about it, and exploding from there. The most important thing is that people know you’re there, right? Number one is be original, with a sub-chapter called “Try Harder.”

M: As a former music journalist yourself, can you smell a bullshit interview a mile away?

RP: Man, I did this interview with this dude from Guelph, and it was a radio thing where the host hid behind an alias while on the air. He was asking me how I felt about Death From Above 1979, and I said that I liked their record. He was like, “Well, what about them as people?” I explained that I’d only met them a couple times, and that they seemed cool. He was like, “Well, I heard that they like to beat up their girlfriends.” Like, what the fuck does that have to do with me? It was so random. That was my first instance of chat-boy culture actually making it to Edmonton. It was on some TMZ type shit. Imagine that was the norm up here? That was a major bullshit moment for sure. I always get asked about other notable Canadian rappers too. It’s always funny when someone says, “What do you think of K-OS or Kardinal?” Why don’t people ask me about Maestro Fresh Wes? He’s the one that called me the black AC/DC.

M: For real?

RP: Yep. He did a show in Edmonton and called me the black AC/DC. I’m thinking of turning it into a shirt. “Cadence Weapon is the Black AC/DC”—Maestro Fresh Wes.

With Buck 65 and Skratch Bastid at
le National on Saturday,
April 19, 9 p.m., $25, all ages