Cadence Weapon

With his love of video-game samples, Friendster references, and tendency to name-check celebrities from Tom Cruise to Tina Fey, rapper Cadence Weapon (a.k.a. Rollie Pemberton) often comes across as a curious hybrid of nerdcore and—with his stabs at the hip-hop mainstream—socially conscious backpacker. Such familiar riffs belie his all-encompassing artistry, however: Pemberton has an intellectual, furiously individualistic flow that sidesteps cliché (it’s not for nothing that his home country of Edmonton recently named him poet laureate), and he backs it up with equally skittering beats and dance-music breaks that make albums like last year’s Afterparty Babies impossible to pin down.

Updated 07/29/2009