Life in the Fast Lane
Cadence Weapon raps with breakneck flow and a love of intense beats
By Greg Katz
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Moby's 'Night' Out
The Circus Stays in Town
Running the Voodoo Down
Too Much Junkie Business
Something 2 dance 2
The Cool Kids Are Alright
Kazell
Rapper-producer Cadence Weapon is a study in contrasts, and he knows it.
“I’m less Rick and more Richard D.” (meaning less like funk legend Rick James, more like techno visionary Richard D. James, aka Aphex Twin), Cadence rhymes on “Juliann Wilding,” one of many standout tracks on his new record, Afterparty Babies.
Besides being clever, the line juxtaposing the Jameses is also bold. Ordinary rappers rarely try to distance themselves from party funk, and even more rarely try to align themselves with cerebral electronica. But 22-year-old Cadence Weapon, born Roland Pemberton III to the seminal Canadian rap radio jock that shares his name, is no ordinary rapper.
Let’s start with a few of the contradictions that characterize this record: Afterparty Babies dropped March 13 on the ANTI- imprint of Epitaph Records, a label that built its name on punk mainstays like Bad Religion, NOFX, and the Offspring. Afterparty Babies is a hip-hop album, but it’s founded neither on underground boom-bap nor mainstream rumble. Instead, Cadence’s beats are rooted unmistakably in a love of electronica, from the maximalist house of “In Search of the Youth Crew” to the Game Boy-meltdown of “Limited Edition OJ Slammer” and the thick grime of “Getting Dumb.”
Taking his cues from his tempos, many of which are a brisk 120 beats per minute (compared to 80 to 100 for most hip-hop), Cadence crams syllables together with an inside-out wordplay that evokes the cleverer elements of both Cam’ron and Busdriver. (In “Juliann Wilding,” for instance, he slyly spits, “I’m cold on the wire/I’ve never been in Wired/I was watching The Wire when we first met.”) But – here’s another contradiction – despite a breakneck flow, lyrical cleverness, and dance beats that would fit neatly in a set at downtown L.A. hipster bar La Cita, the record is an insular one.
Many tracks quickly deteriorate into bitter memoirs of a failed relationship, as on “Tattoos and What They Really Feel Like,” where he rhymes, “The pain only begins when they start shading in,” before admitting, “Am I talking about something else? Well, I usually am.” The tracks that don’t are critiques of a hipster culture that Cadence sometimes thrives in and other times disdains. “I wear pink unironically,” he announces on “The New Face of Fashion.” But “I am the ironic black at your fake Cobrasnake house party!” Even with its dance music underpinnings, the album seems more nervous with each spin, especially with self-referential touches like a facetious cry of “Cadence, you’re crazy for this one,” an allusion to Jay-Z’s studio banter with Rick Rubin on “99 Problems.”
So how does an artist tied to so many different goals and styles reconcile them live? If his March 19 tour stop at the Echo was any indication, it’s by jumping up and down continuously for 45 minutes, fist upraised, nearly screaming his rhymes – bummed-out lyrics be damned.
“I approach shows from the aesthetic of shows I grew up going to, like hardcore shows, punk shows,” he said in an interview after the Echo date. “It’s me and a DJ and a microphone with an old school hip-hop aesthetic, but done in a punk sort of vocal style with electronic music.”
If he seems fully cognizant of the aesthetic disparities he’s embraced, maybe it’s because, in his former life, Cadence was Rollie Pemberton, music writer. After a year as rap critic for webzine Pitchforkmedia.com that culminated in a pink slip from editor Ryan Schreiber, Pemberton bounced between other sites and his own blog, the excellent Razorblade Runner, which he has since abandoned, before music became his full -time gig.
But when asked about his apparent contradictions, Cadence said doesn’t think of his varied musical interests as anything less than perfectly authentic. “I just want to keep it really honest,” he said. “I don’t make any music for critics. People assume that, as a critic, I have an internal advantage, but I don’t make music in that cerebral way.”
Published: 03/26/2008
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