Read an excerpt from Cadence Weapon's upcoming memoir, Bedroom Rapper

The upcoming memoir by Rollie Pemberton (a.k.a. Cadence Weapon) is an ode to hip hop nerds everywhere. Out May 31, Bedroom Rapper: Cadence Weapon on Hip-Hop, Resistance, and Surviving the Music Industry was written at the same time as his 2021 Polaris Music Prize-winning album, Parallel World.

On top of being a musician, Pemberton is also a producer, DJ, poet and critic — putting him in a distinct position to pen a memoir that simultaneously examines his own career and the past 20 years in hip hop music globally. Bedroom Rapper tells his humble origin story and the trials and tribulations of his career thus far, while intertwining commentary on both major and niche movements that have shaped the genre of hip hop from New York to London, England, to Montreal. 

In the following excerpt from Bedroom Rapper, Pemberton chronicles his beginnings: flexing his writing and rhyming skills on online forums as a teen, studying the greats that would inform his own songwriting, finding his stage name, and getting into beat-making and production.

As a teenager growing up in a remote Canadian prairie city, there wasn't a readily accessible street cypher where I could hone my skills. So RapMusic.com essentially became my first rap scene. I discovered a no-holds-barred ecosystem of hundreds of aspiring rappers hurling insults at each other from all around the world. The board was overwhelmingly male and shared a distasteful, irreverent sense of humour with the Something Awful forums that started around the same time (think of these boards as a precursor to 4chan and Reddit). The rappers had usernames like Warbux, Okwerdz, and Poison Pen. 

The early internet bulletin board, complete with a black background, felt like a void you could get stuck in. Most of the textcees were influenced by a cerebral strain of battle rap developed by artists like Eminem, Jedi Mind Tricks, and Canibus. Could you suggest your opponent was mentally stunted while also referencing hieroglyphs and pyramids? Then you'd be very likely to score high marks on RapMusic.com. My username was Antagon, short for antagonist. A working title for my first album was Black Protagonist and that was how I saw myself. Back then, a Black leading man was a rarity in media. In what was essentially self-directed, unrewarded, extracurricular English homework, I set about honing my skills as a textcee on a daily basis after school. 

The board had forums for everything you could think of: discussing new album releases, romantic advice, sports, politics. But the primary draws were the sections for audio and text battling. There were even some real professional underground rappers on there, like Immortal Technique. This was a place where people rapped just for the sake of rapping. There was no financial goal or fanbase to be developed. You'd start a thread with someone else and post verses one after another and other users would determine who had the best punchlines and cleverest lyrics. They had tournaments and crowned champions. 

While trading disses was the main attraction to the board, I also found myself interested in the forum that focused on storytelling. This area was also competitive; the winner was the user who wrote the best story as a rap verse. Storytelling is one of the pillars of rap lyricism, arguably the element that has made the art form such a rich oral tradition. Artists like Slick Rick, KRS-One, and Chuck D made storytelling ability a necessary part of any rapper's repertoire. Furthermore, in the mid-'90s, there was a trend of using personification to tell stories in rap songs: Common's "I Used to Love H.E.R." was a literal love song to hip-hop; "I Gave You Power" by Nas was written from the perspective of a gun; Organized Konfusion's "Stray Bullet" followed the path of an errant gunshot. This style lent itself well to the text format so many people on the board experimented with this technique. It's something I still use to this day.

Most importantly, the story-telling forum was a place where I could be creative without having to put other people down. Already a huge dork who once got 100 percent on an assignment by rewriting Hamlet as a contemporary teen gross-out comedy, these forums were right up my alley. 

After trying my hand at a few text battles and getting some positive feedback from other users, I worked up enough nerve to connect one of those super-long pale grey computer microphones to my mom's desktop and start recording myself rapping out loud with my human voice. To minimize the popping sound I made when saying letters like P and B, I fashioned a homemade pop filter out of a reshaped wire hanger and a spare pair of my mom's pantyhose. I'd send these tracks to my friends over MSN Messenger, upload them to SoundClick, and post them on the board in search of constructive criticism. J. Cole and Earl Sweatshirt used to write verses on boards just like I did. Drake used to post on HipHopCanada.com under the username DrakeHotel; Tyler, the Creator was a regular on the HypeBeast.com forums. Nice to see some of the most bar-centric artists of our time were huge nerds like me, chopping it up online before they made it big. 

And then I met someone on the message board willing to produce for me. We created my first song together. It was called "Payroll Takin' tha Toll" and it sounded like an Ultramagnetic MCs demo from 1987 that was rejected for being too weird. By this point, I was calling myself Payroll, a play on my first name and my vast earning potential. Our song sounded incredibly dated, despite being made in the twenty-first century by two people with access to comparatively advanced digital audio equipment. I breathlessly rhymed about my lyrical supremacy with no consideration for the boundaries of the confounding, irregular, and yet rudimentary beat I was rapping over. 

From there, I tried my luck at audio rap battling on the board. I was terrible, jamming way too many words and syllables into each bar, a problem that arises when shifting from rhyming exclusively on the page to rapping out loud. I would grab whatever instrumentals ripped from 12-inches and CD singles that I could find on Kazaa and step into the arena. Anything was fair game: weight, appearance, sex, location, whatever. Knowledge was power and anything you knew about a competitor became the foundational clay of your diss track. My heart was never really in the battle scene though, and soon I shifted away from the message board entirely and started getting serious about recording some real rap music.

Around this time, I came up with a new name. Payroll just didn't fit. First off, I nor anyone else I knew had any money. And it didn't really jibe with the anti-commercial stance of the rappers who influenced me. I noticed that whenever I'd fire up an instrumental and freestyle, I would end up unconsciously returning to one particular mantra: my cadence is my weapon, my cadence is my weapon. I prided myself on having a variety of ways of presenting my vocals when I rapped. I shortened the mantra and became Cadence Weapon. It was my shorthand for music as a weapon, rap as a vehicle for change.

At our family Christmas celebration in 2001, I declared to my uncle Brett Miles that I'd started rapping. In most families, this statement would be met with rolled eyes and skeptical expressions. Not mine. We went to my aunt's basement so I could kick some rhymes for him in private. Uncle Brett was an accomplished jazz saxophonist who had previously lived in New York, performed with James Brown and recorded on sessions for Mick Jagger. He was a heavy musician. He'd started a band called Magilla Funk Conduit that gigged around town. He had long stringy dreads and a vibrant array of technicolor daishikis. If there is a patron saint of funk, he probably looks something like Uncle Brett. His wife, Dani, was an accomplished dancer. They were the first adults I knew who were making a living through art. After hearing me rap, Brett was amazed by my vocabulary and started calling me Thesaurus Jones. 

Brett invited me to join his funk band as an additional vocalist. The following year I performed with him at local venues like the Sugar Bowl and Sidetrack Café and got free glasses of cranberry juice and some pocket change. I couldn't believe my luck. This was my introduction to the stage. I'd go on holding an index card with the first word of every verse I had previously memorized written on it just in case I forgot something. I was just jamming with my uncle and his friends back then, but performing live became one of the great passions of my life.

I started to chat with producers from the message board on ICQ. I eventually stacked up enough original instrumentals from a beatmaker called Taj Mahal to record my demo, 2003's Soldier Speech EP. I was seventeen years old. The tracks he made were relatively conventional loops, a mix of the same sample-heavy beats you might hear on a late '90s underground rap album, along with imitations of the chipmunk soul trend taking over the mainstream; the sound fell somewhere between Rawkus and Roc-A-Fella. To be honest, the beats never really suited me, but production wasn't my focus back then. I just wanted to hear myself on record. My idea of pushing musical boundaries at the time was rhyming over a loop of "The Gash" by the Flaming Lips. I was already deconstructing Pharoahe Monch and Aesop Rock verses for fun and had clearly decided that using big words was my answer to every problem: 

Used music, trashcan rap status in a new movement
Loose truants, broken microphone zone, delusion
Union unit, metronome abusers known as metafusion
Such a nuisance, found truth in televised revolution
Evolution, what you're using, vanity mirror redundance
Sanity fears my function, outlandishly sears assumptions
Banality leers combustion, only confused choose to lose a muse
Refuse to abuse fools, they'll infuse views into the news

You can hear the hiss on my vocals from the cheap microphone I was using, as well as unintentional room noise because I was recording my verses in my HMV friend Vanid's tenth-floor apartment underneath a mountain of couch cushions that we used as a recording booth. I was heavily influenced by Nas at the time, who inspired me and so many other young hip-hoppers by releasing his epoch-defining debut Illmatic when he was only twenty years old. What Vanid and I made was far from perfect. The quality of my performances fluctuates wildly from track to track. Sometimes, trying to rap fast like Myka 9 or Busdriver, I sound out of breath. My verses on the EP are claustrophobically cluttered, self-indulgent, and way too clever for their own good. I had not yet developed a consistent musical identity and instead pushed a vaguely political, morally authoritative stance that was based on pretty much nothing. 

Still, Vanid and I both agreed that it was pretty damn good for a seventeen-year-old. So, I set about burning it onto CDRs and selling it out of my backpack to my friends at school, my family, and random strangers. Yes, that's right: I was once the man on the street asking passersby if they love real hip-hop. My first girlfriend, Lisa, helped me spray-paint the adhesive labels for the discs on the floor of her basement, creating unique purple and pink gradients that looked like deep-space nebulas. 

Lisa and I vibed because we were the only kids we knew who listened to the Strokes and Yeah Yeah Yeahs, bands who inspired my eventual performance style and personal aesthetic. The paint dried and made the labels rise up a little; I worried that they'd get stuck in people's car stereos. Lacking any sense of decorum or understanding of the performer-audience boundary, I managed to throw a couple mixtapes on stage during the Blackalicious show when they played at Red's in West Edmonton Mall. 

I reached out to some internet producers to put together a proper album and it ended up being an unexpected musical turning point. I hit up this one producer I knew from Finland on ICQ and asked him to make me a beat using a sample of "The Stroke" by Billy Squier, a painfully cheesy '80s pop-rock single that had a surprisingly decent drum break in it. I went to Money Mart and expeditiously sent the producer one hundred Canadian dollars via Western Union money order after he sent me a short unusable snippet of what the beat might sound like. Suddenly, our communication broke down. He ignored me, stopped answering my messages, and never supplied me with the lame beat that I'd paid for. 

Defeated, a stray thought crept into my mind: Couldn't I just make this beat myself? I fired up Soulseek, downloaded a low bitrate MP3 file of "The Stroke," and then pulled up the Sound Recorder program from the Accessories folder in Windows 95. Sound Recorder was the most basic recording application you could possibly use. It makes GarageBand look like the Tonto synthesizer. It was not designed for making music. It had no visual interface or sequencer to let you see what you were doing. I would load up a file, copy a time selection with a sound in it, go to the end of the track, scroll past the silence at the end of the song, paste the sound there,and then repeat this process until I had created a beat with some semblance of musicality. The herky-jerky mess that resulted from this process sounded a bit like the experimental compositions that people actively try to make today. 

Around the turn of the century, hip-hop producers were becoming just as popular and influential as the artists who rapped over their tracks and I found myself inspired by many of them. Timbaland's beats were electric and otherworldly, full of syncopated alien rhythms that felt as if they were beamed in from a distant, funkier future. The Neptunes took the schoolyard immediacy of kids pounding on the lunch table, blew it up, and made it widescreen. The way that RZA and Prince Paul could reconfigure stray howls and grunts from ancient funk and soul records to turn them into a warped sample orchestra transfixed me. 

After reading an article about how 9th Wonder from Little Brother made beats with a program called Fruity Loops (FL), I dug around the dark corners of the internet and connected to a torrent holding a cracked copy of the program. The thing that set FL apart from other production suites of that time was the fact that it was user-friendly and intuitive. People who used hardware to make beats took pride in how difficult the gear was to use. The colourful interface and short learning curve made FL feel more like a really addictive video game than a studio tool. I fooled around with it a few times without creating anything of consequence until one particular session changed everything. 

It was the middle of summer and I lived in my mother's attic. I was sweating in oppressive, stifling heat. I was playing around with some bass synth preset sounds and started layering what sounded to me like a rocket blast hitting a battleship from the inside of a submarine. It was watery and undulating. The rhythm track I created for it was strange and somewhat illogical. It didn't start with a kick on the one, and the percussive elements were what was driving the rhythm. It was cold, mechanical, icy. It certainly didn't sound like any rap I had ever heard before. It was electronic but I didn't have any sonic reference that I could compare it to. Looking back, you might say that I was making grime or techno. It probably sounded a bit like video game music, which was a huge inspiration to me. At the time, it felt completely new. I couldn't help but feel an exciting connection to what I had just made. I had no training, couldn't read music, and wouldn't be able to tell you what key the melody was in. But something about this beat made me want to rap and so I rhymed over it for a couple hours. This wasn't like when I rapped over beats I got from some random European guy I'd never met before. This was my music. I saved the file as "depthcharge.flp." In my mind, I was officially a producer.

Excerpted from Bedroom Rapper: Cadence Weapon on Hip-Hop, Resistance, and Surviving the Music Industry by Rollie Pemberton. Copyright © 2022 by Rollie Pemberton. Published by McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.