Edmonton, Alberta. It’s Canada’s sixth largest city, but has
10 percent of New York’s population density. It’s given us Robert
Goulet, Jill Hennessy, and, uh, Tommy Chong. It’s home to the Oilers
and North America’s largest mall, a 1.2 billion (Canadian) dollar
monstrosity with more than 20,000 parking spaces. (Frozen) Compton, it
ain’t.
But, nonetheless, Edmonton is where the next great Canadian hiphop
hope—the last was either the elastic-but-average K-OS or the
embarrassingly famous Snow, depending on whom you ask—calls home.
That’d be the aptly named Cadence Weapon, an Aesop-recalling,
Kweli-nicking 21-year-old who’d rather go by his given name (Rollie
Pemberton) and write for the local alt weekly (he does) than develop
anything resembling an ego. Some hiphop fastcomers spit shallow tales
so loud they can’t be tuned out. But Pemberton, who wrote for Pitchfork
as a teenager, marches to, well, a different beat.
“I’m DJing a puppet show in a couple of hours,” says Pemberton from
the Edmonton thinkspace where he’s in the midst of mixing the follow-up
to spring’s Breaking Kayfabe. “Don’t worry, man. I’m DJing
after the puppet show. I don’t want to interfere with the
magnitude of the hipster puppetry.”
Nominated for a Polaris (that’s
Canadian for Mercury) Music Prize in 2006—an award Pemberton
eventually conceded to current tour companion Final
Fantasy—Breaking Kayfabe‘s a proper initiation to
Pemberton’s real-world rap poetry and fashion-free artistic aesthetics.
Impressive, considering it’s ultimately just the product of his rare,
and very precocious, talent.”It’s funny, because it came out in Canada
at the end of 2005 and I made a lot of it a year and a half before
that,” laughs Pemberton. “Here’s this album that I made when I was 15,
16, and I’m performing it at 21. It’s like, ‘Man, I was this little
idiot.’ But the new one has way more dance beats and a song where I’m
beatboxing, like slapping my knees and hands. It’ll have some new stuff
and be different.”
In other words, no, it’s not the product of frozen Compton. But it
ain’t Robert Goulet, either.