Rollie Pemberton - Bedroom Rapper: Cadence Weapon on Hip-Hop, Resistance and Surviving the Music Industry

Id imagine a healthy number of you hold this book in your hands explicitly because of the year Cadence Weapon has just had. Theres no shame in that. Parallel World put jumper cables to Rollie Pembertons career, sparking overdue recognition from the typically cold and indifferent music media (heartbreaking: the worst industry you know just made a great call). The right album at the right time, it launched a wave of rejuvenation which resulted in front covers, news chyrons and a few shiny trophies for the mantlepiece.

Well, prizes are nice and all, but Bedroom Rapper would have been worth the ride anyway. This memoir isnt really about Cadence Weapon the rapper. Its about Rollieat once the smartest guy in the room and someone who is disdainful of the metrics by which we measure smartan erudite, funny, omnivorous music hound whose life has been speckled by encounters that seem too rich and rare to dream up.

Rollies earnestly nerdy approach to everything from beatmaking to self-actualisation should scan as deeply relatable to this books likely audience. No matter what era you first came across him, Bedroom Rapper is littered with close-micd detailsrhyming over the Flaming Lips, conjuring sunrise Larry Levan tributes for his friends, dropping The Roots on his classmates as St. Francis Xavier High Schools official cafeteria DJwhich makes you feel like youve known the man all along, and maybe even spy a bit of him in yourself too. I mean, tanking catastrophically before Rihanna at a festival? Weve all been there.

How Rollie recalls half this stuff is a mysteryseriously, try and remember all the computer software you were using two decades ago, or the exact names of your saved files, and youll hit a wall pretty fastbut his attention to detail will hit the pleasure points of anyone who grew up or came up in the early 21st century. This might be the most 00s sentence ever committed to print, hell tell you at one stage, after having rapped Paper Planes on stage with Diplo. Truthfully? There are dozens of contenders within.

His storytelling not only revives a compendium of forgotten clubs, blogs and hits, but taps into the nomadic duality of a modern recording artist: an existence spent shuttling between late nights and early mornings, unceasingly needing to keep pace with a digital landscape that conjures fresh social interfaces, audio formats and marketing demands every year.

Although we realise now that wed actually performed at the same London clubnight in 2007, Rollie and I first met properly in May 2012. He was on the road with Japandroids, then the reigning kings of chest-beating indie rock (who still slap, for what its worth). The tour was winding through Nottingham, which you might say is the U.K. equivalent of Saskatoon or Denver: a large-ish city floating somewhere in the middle of the map, with lots going on but a comparatively light artistic footprint. The chances Rollie knew anyone in the entire English county of Nottinghamshire were marginal, but we happened to board on the same music forum so I offered up my place to crash.

Looking back, that bill was a curious pairing. For one, Rollie didnt employ the services of a wind machine on stage. Both acts were fond of late-night drinking and pondering lifes great intangibles, but that wasnt remotely the vibe you were getting from a Cadence Weapon record at the time. Yet this was the peak of Cool Canada, where all the DeMarcos and Bouchers of this world pallied together, so it made vague sense. I honestly just marvelled at the guy. Touring the world, hanging with rockstars and a Television Personalities tattoo adorning his arm? The six-year age gap between us felt chasmic.

Memory tells me the set went well, as Rollie galvanised bar-hugging early arrivals with some call-and-response chants, and ended with Loft Party, a fun Meek Mill-referencing loosie that may have gone down even better if any of the white students in attendance were even peripherally aware of Meek Mill. A triple-grimace spread over my face after reading that this was precisely the kind of environment which made Rollie want to pack MCing in completely. Not only does Rollie explain 2012s