Cadence Weapon: Rapper Sounds Off on Drake Diss, Odd Future and Rap Beefs
‘Tis the season for year-end lists. But it’s not just music critics and bloggers tallying up the records that rocked 2011, Cadence Weapon is also taking stock of the releases that moved him this year — and he’s not pulling any punches when it comes to albums that fall flat either.
So whose record failed to make the cut? Well, after his recent tweet comparing Drake’s ‘Thank Me Later’ to a “book on tape,” it’s safe to say that ol’ Drizzy isn’t getting any blue ribbons from Cadence Weapon.
“With Drake’s album, I feel the same way when I go to see a blockbuster movie: it’s really well made but just doesn’t do anything for me,” he tells Spinner.
“There’s a couple good tracks on it,” he adds. “I end up only liking a few tracks here and there from contemporary rap; it’s not designed for me, it’s designed for whoever still buys albums.”
But Cadence Weapon, who got fans hyped on his forthcoming effort, ‘Roquentin,’ at last month’s M for Montreal Festival, knows where to draw the line when it comes to calling out another rapper.
“I don’t want to diss Drake now and never be able to go for a ride in his Maybach,” he jokes. “I feel like every journalist tries to get you to slag him off. When you interview Timber Timbre do you think the journalist goes, ‘So what do you think about Bon Iver, is there a beef?’ No, that would never happen. It sucks, ‘cause it creates a problem for me because I want to make music that’s maybe not so confrontational…”
He may be cautious about insulting a rap star of Drake’s caliber, but Cadence Weapon speaks a little more freely about the current chart-toppers en masse.
“Anything that is instantly hyped, I don’t take it very seriously,” says the rapper, now based in Montreal after putting his hometown of Edmonton on the map with his clever rhymes (and thought-provoking verses as the city’s distinguished Poet Laureate). “Music that’s going to last for longer than like one or five or 10 years, you can tell it a mile away. I feel like every few months there’s a new thing that everyone is talking about … I don’t really have time for it; I have too much older music to listen to still, so many classics to listen to.”
When “instantly hyped” is dropped in reference to the current rap scene, a guy like Tyler, the Creator, the loudmouth ringleader of OFWGKTA, invariably comes up. So what’s Cadence Weapon’s take on the young phenomenon?
“When I was first hearing about Tyler, the Creator, I felt like I was seeing an alternate version of myself in some ways,” he explains. ” Not really in the content, but musically it’s like the stuff I made when I was a kid. And it was happening all the time, people were coming up to me, ‘That Tyler guy, he’s a lot like you.’ Or, I would be DJing somewhere and a girl would come up and be like, ‘Are you trying to dress like Tyler, the Creator?’ ‘No, I’ve been dressing like this the whole time.’”
‘I do think the guy Earl [Sweatshirt] from Odd Future is a great rapper,” he offers. “Contemporary rap doesn’t really sit with me but there are a few things I’m absolutely loving right now like A$AP Rocky and Spoek Mathambo.”
When it comes to Cadence Weapon’s own material, it’s ’90s rap that he’ll always represent. “I get really inspired by the process that Outkast used with their tracks. For a lot of their early-’90s rap they would have a band come in and do interpolations of the things they wanted to sample, and I wanted to take that to the next level for ‘Roquentin.’
