The City Imagines: Parallel World with Cadence Weapon
Event Details
“Afrofuturist, Black urbanist / Black verbalist, Black journalist, revisionist / I resurrect through remembrance” declares Rollie Pemberton, aka Cadence Weapon, on “Africville’s Revenge” the first track of his Polaris-shortlisted album Parallel World. The album’s ten songs invite a lyrical reckoning with community displacement, encampment removals, the gentrification of Little Jamaica, police profiling, racialized surveillance, and other insidious forces that control or displace Black communities. “It is what it is / It ain’t what it seems” sings Pemberton on the album’s last track, “Connect,” which moves through a landscape of loneliness and emotional overload to land as a call for change.
Moderated by Cheryll Case.
Works featured:
- Parallel World by Cadence Weapon (bandcamp)
Parallel World
Parallel World touches on themes of systemic racism, structural inequality, police profiling, gentrification, the internet’s pervasive effects on our lives and the surveillance state that disproportionately punishes Black people. Using elements of trap, drill, grime and acid house, Parallel World is the soundtrack for the dystopian future we’ve somehow found ourselves in.
