“The people want shirts,” Rollie Pemberton insists as he flicks through a long rack at a Southern Ontario Mission Thrift Store. The author and rapper-producer-DJ who makes music as Cadence Weapon eyes a black-and-blue Nike long-sleeve, pulls it out, and studies the tag. Is it true vintage? “With the font, you can tell,” he says, and a smile crosses his face. In lieu of Nike’s traditional logos, the brand’s name is in a rounded sans serif. The shirt appears to be about 25 years old. “It still feels futuristic. I like the early 2000s Nike and Adidas stuff. It triggers the raver impulse in me.”
The Hamilton-via-Edmonton Polaris Music Prize winner has woven the sound and spirit of electronic music into his albums and DJ sets over much of his two-decade career. That isn’t the reason we’re here, however.
Pemberton is bringing me into a process that has directly informed his next album – and the philosophies that have shaped both his latest book and broader world view. He has, in recent years, become obsessed with dressing himself well, and now curates items for others, too, selling through his business Searcher Vintage. Why not share the feeling of looking good with everyone?
The kind of treasure-digging elation that’s inherent to vintage shopping is also central to Forager, Pemberton’s seventh album in two decades. Released April 24 by Six Shooter Records, it draws bold lines from the craftsmanship of quality vintage wear to the time-tested durability of hip-hop paragons. And on May 26, he’ll release his second book with McClelland & Stewart – Ways of Listening: Building a Deeper Relationship with Music in the Streaming Era – imploring readers to cast aside the algorithm and find pleasure in self-directed curiosity.
Pemberton insists on refinement, and on curiosity, across his life. The 40-year-old believes that to wade through the ever-thickening muck of profit-driven content and consumerism, and their ever-shortening trend cycles, we must insist on those same principles. We can hold ourselves to standards much higher than the status quo. We just need to hunt for real feeling.
With both projects arriving within weeks of each other, Pemberton is staking a claim, two decades into his career, as Canadian culture’s chief connoisseur of craftsmanship. Is this moment a response to the encroachment of generative artificial intelligence models taking over so much of the creative world? Partially, but Pemberton has always cared for finer details.
Textures and tags are on Pemberton’s mind on this mid-April day, but the feelings he hunts for across his work are manifold. It could be the physical feel of high-quality linen as he grazes his hands along a rack – or it could be the emotional feeling that such a texture evokes. He brings this same attentiveness to music – seeking the spiritual experience of having his musical universe expand, say, by studying the liner notes of a beloved album, tracking down the session drummer or recording engineer, and figuring out what else they’ve recorded.
Today, surrounded by seniors and shifty-eyed suspected resellers in a series of Southern Ontario thrift stores, Pemberton is far more than the sum of his room-reading DJ instincts or his time-tested flows on songs such as Oliver Square, Conditioning, or My Crew (Wooo). Here, he is what you might call Fully Realized Rollie: a curator of intense curiosity hunting for fine details in a sea of detritus.
Pemberton performs as Cadence Weapon in 2013 at the Independent Music Awards.DCP/GMP/The Canadian Press
Pemberton’s emerging years as an artist and writer, as traced in his 2022 memoir Bedroom Rapper, were filled with drive, with a few fortuitous moments. He battle-rapped on message boards, then over low-tech audio files, as he built out the flows and sound he would achieve on his 2005 debut Breaking Kayfabe. At the same time, he transmuted a teenaged turn as Pitchfork’s rap-specialist critic into a separate career as an essayist. In the early 2000s, it so happens, he worked at an Edmonton vintage store called Divine Decadence. The store was another outpost of the city’s creative scene, next door to a crucial American Apparel, and he did not spend much time considering how he dressed. Yet it accidentally foreshadowed how he would later extend his creativity, with hints laced into the song The New Face of Fashion, from 2008’s Afterparty Babies.
“When I was a kid, my family used to call me Dirty Shirt,” he says. But as gradually as his stylistic mindset was firming up, it was heading toward where it is today. “I was very opinionated about fashion, but my self-perception of how I should look was not refined or developed.”
He was named Edmonton’s poet laureate in 2009, and released Hope in Dirt City in 2012. A pair of Polaris Music Prize nominations propelled Pemberton to the forefront of indie-music conversations at a moment when those conversations centred primarily around rock. But he was still fundamentally a working musician. His on-paper successes were marked by both innate restlessness and frustration with the music industry – the latter at least partly prompted, he would later reveal, by long-standing dispute with his early record label. So he decamped to Montreal, deepening his relationship with electronic music and embedding himself in the city’s increasingly mythologized 2010s creative scene.
For a time, one of Canada’s most celebrated rappers sustained himself by dumpster diving and participating in academic research studies at McGill University, eschewing traditional work as he took the time to simply be creative – writing poetry, DJing and collaborating on others’ projects while starting to garb himself in vintage blazers and high-patterned shirts. Though Pemberton retains elements of that style today, the details are more important: he prefers Oxford button-down collars and blazers of silk, linen or wool. “It’s more thoughtfully considered,” he says.
Pemberton’s recent creative process involved connecting with contemporary hip-hop while taking part in an artist residency program on the Toronto Islands.Wade Hudson/The Globe and Mail
Pemberton landed in Toronto in 2015, following his then-girlfriend who came to the city for work, eventually landing in nearby, more-affordable Hamilton. (He is now married to a Globe and Mail investigative reporter.) Soon he was preparing for a return to recorded music; he released a self-titled album in 2018, and Parallel World in 2021.
The latter was his third to be shortlisted for the Polaris. Pemberton once had a fraught relationship with the prize, and it played a role in his early-career hunger. After first being nominated in 2006, and then hyped as a potential winner, the loss devastated him.
Parallel World, an album that reckoned with the many facets of structural racism, hit different. He had grown, becoming more comfortable in his studiousness while honing his directness. A decade and a half after his first loss, he took the Polaris prize home in 2021. Was the hunger that kept him going after Breaking Kayfabe still there after the win?
“It’s what’s allowed me to sustain,” he says. “I always have that feeling. I always feel like there’s another step. I’ve never even been nominated for a Juno. The next thing I want is to win one of those. There’s a lot of frontiers to reach – there’s the Grammys. There’s so much life to be had.”
Yet after the release of Parallel World, and its 2024 follow-up Rollercoaster – plus the birth of his son between the two – he was feeling creatively stuck. He was supposed to be writing his next book at an artist residency in the summer of 2024 at the Gibraltar Point Centre for the Arts on the Toronto Islands, but he struggled getting words on the page. He knew he wanted to write about deepening one’s relationship with music, but he kept hitting walls.
On walks around the island and on ferry rides, Pemberton found himself listening to vanguards of contemporary rap – Boldy James, Earl Sweatshirt, Roc Marciano, Action Bronson. In particular, he gravitated to their work produced by California’s the Alchemist, a leading builder of sample-heavy, soul-flavoured beats that exude languorousness.
“There’s just something about the nature of those records that’s very casual, very organic and very off the cuff,” he says. He made a decision: he’d pushed the electronic production that backed much of his previous work to its limits. He wanted to make something that sounded like a rap standard.
Pemberton began writing verses in his head, and began ferrying back to the city to record them with Junia-T, a Toronto producer and arranger whose 2021 record Studio Monk captured the same soundscapes Pemberton wanted to evoke. They’d already collaborated in 2023 for a song called Toronto Zoo (just released this April); now it was time for something bigger.
Junia-T likes to make music by building songs, tearing them down and putting them back together again. A student of astute samplers such as Pete Rock, J Dilla, DJ Premier and, yes, the Alchemist, he chops up old records and studio sessions to build his beats. After vocals are recorded, he then brings in a select group of musicians to rerecord the backing tracks live. “I like to see the songs evolve and blossom,” he says.
To start, he likes to create his beats from scratch in the moment, working with artists to harness the vibe they’re feeling with samples. The producer offers the example of Forager song Alpenflage, a lyrical tribute to Swiss military camouflage pattern built on an Afrobeat framework.
“I’m feeling kind of Fela Kuti today,” Pemberton told him one day in his Queen Street West studio.
So Junia-T asked: If Afrobeat was the vibe, was he thinking new- or old-school? “Old-school,” Pemberton replied. The producer wasted no time cutting up samples of syncopated drums and a languid guitar lick.
Pemberton, as he did for much of Forager, rapped only one or two vocal takes, riding the moment’s emotion like a wave at its peak. (“I’m a bit of a cowboy with that kind of thing,” he says.) A hand-picked cadre of musicians then flooded into the studio – including Mark Anthony King Edward James and Chino de Villa, who work with Junia-T in Jessie Reyez’s band – and rebuilt the song the way only Junia-T could, and the exact way Pemberton had envisioned. The album’s first single was born.
Like the music of Sweatshirt and Bronson, Pemberton’s work is technical but slyly funny. Both he and Junia-T can’t stop pointing out how much they laughed during the sessions.
Still, the producer sees Pemberton’s writing as a kind of commentary on humanity. And it comes from a place of deep, cross-disciplinary knowledge. “He’s a high-art appreciator,” Junia-T says.
That appreciation, of course, extends to fashion – the subject of many of Forager’s songs. Pemberton raps, on opening track Honus, that he’s “the man with the most coats.” “I seen it for real, every day,” Junia-T says with a laugh.
In music as well as in thrifting, Pemberton believes there is gold to be found in the sea of options. Human listeners can find hidden treasure even as algorithms overwhelm us.Wade Hudson/The Globe and Mail
At a Value Village a few kilometres from Mission Thrift, Pemberton has his eyes on four vintage Carhartt overshirts just hauled from out back, yet to be thrust onto the rack. Minus some light fading, they appear to be in great shape.
He used to find thrifting stressful. With patience, time and a strengthening eye, he’s now comfortable here. He feels the same about his creative work. When he’s performing songs from 20 years ago, “it literally feels like another person made all that stuff,” he tells me. But there’s a caveat. “I still have the same kind of spirit that I did back then. I want to learn. I want to search. I want to be creative.”
With his new book, he wants to pass that spirit to others. Pemberton is a leading musical voice arguing that streaming has devalued music – not just financially, but in how society considers it. Millions of tracks are cast aside in favour of convenient playlists and algorithmic song-surfing, rendering many listeners complacent and often reframing music as background content. “We risk a bland existence if we only accept recommendations that have a capacity for smoothness,” Pemberton writes.
Ways of Listening offers an antidote for curious listeners: Find the gold hidden among the castaways, like, say, the quarter-century-old double-kneed Carhartt jeans he finds tucked in a sea of newer Levi’s 511s at Value Village. With tenacity, human listeners can find hidden treasure.
In this guidebook for the curious (and should-be-curious), Pemberton teaches readers how to find grails at record stores, such as by noting if hip-hop and R&B sections are merged; this suggests the owners’ ignorance of the nuances and value of historically Black music, meaning treasures may be inside. He examines the ways musicians use nostalgia as a tool, too, and its role in the way subcultures have shifted into aesthetics.
Cultural attachments feel less definitive today, he argues. He links the search for music that moves you to his motivation for hitting the thrift racks, too. He founded his vintage reselling business, he writes, in part because of “an appreciation for the higher-quality natural materials of the past, which have been replaced with cheaper synthetic alternatives.”
Pemberton keeps looking for ways to feel present; to feel connected; to feel real. He made an album focused on the clothes that move him, recorded with live musicians, in the middle of writing a book about seeking out music that feels great.
Oh, and those Carhartt overshirts? One of them makes him feel pretty great.
It’s green. There’s another green one, but there’s something about the buttons that feel, Pemberton says, “silly.” I eye a rust-brown one, but Pemberton calls dibs until he tries it on. It doesn’t fit the way he wants. I grab it next, and am glad I’d had my eye on it. It fits just right; I’m wearing it, weeks later, as I write this. Pemberton is helping me see clothes in a new light. With Forager and Ways of Listening, you see the world in new ways, too.