I’ve done it numerous times. But bigging up artists I know personally, am otherwise acquainted with, or I’ve casually observed on the internets feels a little funny. This is especially true of the latter. I guess there’s just something surreal about playing the role of fan to someone you watched grow from a kid posting beats, rhymes and opinionated diatribes on the baby-blue pages of some Hip-Hop message board into a full-fledged recording artist.
Today I’m in a position to do just that though because Edmonton, Alberta-based emcee/producer Cadence Weapon (born Rollie Pemberton) is such a kid. He’s also the kind of artists that certain heads might fall all over themselves to hate on. Why? He’s mad young. He’s the son of a pioneering DJ, Brooklyn-born Teddy Pemberton, who helped introduce Hip-Hop to Alberta in the early ’80s. He rose to prominence via the interweb. He’s a former blogger and music journalist who used to review records for Pitchfork Media and a few other outlets. He’s Canadian. He annunciates. His rhyme content (androgyny, Heroes villain Syler, etc) is atypical and a bit vulnerable. And his music often pays homage to an era he’s too young to remember, and which some hard-rock wanna-be-purists would prefer wasn’t romanticized at all.
In that respect I see him and Chicago duo Cool Kids as musical kin. That is, if their minimalist throwback Rap bore as much in common with avant-garde IDM, the so-called Emo-Rap of Atmosphere, the futuristic B-Boy Space-Rap of Definitive Jux and progressive West Coast Indie rappers like Busdriver and Subtitle as it does slumpy mid-to-late ’80s joints with simple 808 beats. You’d also have to trade the BMX bikes and obsession with hipster fashion for video games and a fascination with club culture, but you get the idea, right?
Honestly, his sophomore album Afterparty Babies, out today on Epitaph Records, boasts references to both video game hero Mega Man and the rituals associated with clubbing & nightlife, but it’s more concerned conceptually with the latter. The title itself stems from a quote from Cadence Weapon’s father about him being the product of wild after-party lovin’, and he dedicates it to “all the accidents out there” on the opening track “Do I Miss My Friends” before telling them to “keep making mistakes.” He spends the rest of the album going over the details of his own sometimes party-fueled, sometimes introspective existence as a Hip-Hop artist maneuvering through a landscape of nightclubs & afterparties while delving into the sounds (notably House and Techno) that drove and still drive dancefloor debauchery.
Cuts like “In Search of the Youth Crew,” “We Move Away” and the first single “House Music” are full-on dance jams based around four-on-the-floor drum-programming, chopped & filtered Disco samples, acidic synths and blaring Rave sirens. And that’s enough of a departure from the stereotypical sounds (recycled mid-’90s Boom-Bap, non-rhythmic dissonant experimentalism, etc) expected from Indie-Rap artists to leave me pleasantly surprised by the Cadence Weapon’s progress to date.
Cadence Weapon “House Music”
- El Keter
