Culture Prairie Pop
Prairie Rap North or south of the Canadian border, a Midwest ethos drives Cadence Weapon’s sound. BY KEMBREW MCLEOD
“O
ne thing that people maybe don’t know about Canada is that the places above and below the border are similar to each other,” said Rollie Pemberton, a Canadian MC who performs as Cadence Weapon. “I live in Toronto now, and we definitely get kind of Detroit vibes over here, whereas Alberta, where I’m originally from, resembles Montana, the Dakotas and Midwestern places like Iowa.” Pemberton’s dynamic set at the 2022 Mission Creek Festival in Iowa City consisted of just him, a mic, laptop and some assorted audio gear—a DIY approach that echoes the way that he makes his music and has forged a career as a writer and critic. This single-minded, can-do approach was shaped by growing up in the geographic and cultural margins, a place that many people in Canada don’t even think about except when it’s the butt of a joke. Much like Iowa. “I see parallels between those places,” he told me. “You know, the whole time I was in Iowa City, there was a sense of familiarity, a kind of friendly Midwestern sensibility. Where I’m from, Edmonton, it’s a prairie city, and it’s also a little more country. Coming from an environment like that, and making a Black art form, and trying to be respected by other rap fans and artists, it was a challenge.” As a ’90s kid, Pemberton’s form of recreation and escape was to connect with others on the newly emerging internet, which was a portal to like-minded hip-hop heads throughout the world. “When I was growing up, I wasn’t aware of any local rap scene,” Pemberton said. “So, for me, the internet was like an online version of a street corner cipher. That was where I learned how to rap for real. I’d be writing lyrics and sending them to people and having them critique them.” This led him to writing about music on early music blogs and websites like Pitchfork. And file-sharing gave him the software tools that helped him start making his own music—a career arc that culminated in a string of accomplishments over the past two years. In 2021, Pemberton released his critically-acclaimed album Parallel World, which won the prestigious Polaris Music Prize in Canada. This was followed closely by the release of his debut
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book, Bedroom Rapper: Cadence Weapon on Hip-Hop, Resistance, and Surviving the Music Industry (May, 2022; McClelland & Stewart/ Penguin Random House Canada). “It’s something that I worked on over the entire pandemic, basically, for a couple years, and it was at the same time as I made my last album,” he said. “So, it was a process where I would be writing during the day in the morning, and then I’d go to the studio at night, so I was just insanely productive at that time.” Parallel World’s title holds a few different meanings for Pemberton. He wrote and recorded the album while in quarantine, which made him feel very trapped, so he wanted to create some-
Cadence Weapon performs at Gabe’s during Mission Creek Festival, April 2022 Jason Smith / Little Village
got brands on me, got ads on me / Not asking me but they’re still on me, got scams on me,” he raps in “On Me,” the album’s second track. “Got my name in registry so they stay on me, won’t let me free.” Pemberton’s critical perspective is, in part, the product of being different than most everyone else while growing up. “When I was in elementary school,” Pemberton said, “I was the only Black student in the entire school, and then in junior high, there
“WHEN I WAS GROWING UP, I WASN’T AWARE OF ANY LOCAL RAP SCENE. SO, FOR ME, THE INTERNET WAS LIKE AN ONLINE VERSION OF A STREET CORNER CIPHER. THAT WAS WHERE I LEARNED HOW TO RAP FOR REAL. I’D BE WRITING LYRICS AND SENDING THEM TO PEOPLE AND HAVING THEM CRITIQUE THEM.” thing that was a kind of gateway into an alternate reality that listeners could relate to as well. “That’s where I started thinking of the idea of a parallel world,” he said. “But then the more I thought about it, writing about themes like structural racism got me thinking about how one can walk down the street and see another person and then realize, ‘OK, we are on the same street, we live in the same neighborhood, but our lives might be completely different, depending on our race.’” The glitchy, experimental electronic beats and futuristic textures on Parallel World exude an alternate reality-like vibe, but its lyrical concerns are grounded in very real-world concerns, like surveillance and racial profiling. “All geotagged,
were like six other Black kids.” He grew up surrounded by a library of music, and he spent much of his time as a kid daydreaming about what his music would one day sound like. It took until the turn of the century before hip hop became more entrenched in Alberta, thanks to mainstream rappers like Eminem and 50 Cent, but Pemberton had already been heavily schooled in the genre by his father, Teddy Pemberton, who was from Brooklyn, New York. His son remembers Teddy bringing back albums from record stores in New York City—lots of funk, R&B and soul, though hip hop was his main passion—and he had a long-running show on a local college radio station. “He was a DJ who had a radio program that
