blog post Inside Tracks: "88" by Cadence Weapon

Inside Tracks offers insights about specific songs, directly from the artists themselves. 

A few days ago, Cadence Weapon dropped “88.”  The first in an “every week or so” series of unreleased tracks, it shows the Edmonton born rapper joining forces with his Montreal neighbour, Grimes, who released her fourth LP, Visions, earlier this week. Grimes is indie-rock's ingénue of the moment, loosing spools of mirrored synths, dark beats and overlapping vocals. On this cut, Cadence Weapon undid her new-age sorcery: “88” takes the instrumental from Grimes' “Eight” and makes it a chunky tribute to New York's 1988. The MC – who was born in 1986 – imagines himself as Roll Love, “rapping about reality and not pushing weight.” Listen for yourself:

88

Cadence Weapon on “88,” ’88 and future team-ups with Claire "Grimes" Boucher:

“Claire and I have been pals since I moved to Montreal. We're a part of the same circle here, usually revolving around bands on Arbutus Records and the venue/arts space La Brique. It always seemed like a foregone conclusion that we'd do a song together.

“The beat is just her instrumental from “Eight.” When she originally finished Visions last year, she had me over to hear it. “Eight” instantly resonated with me. I had remixed both “Dark Heart” and “Crystal Ball” from her previous solo albums so for this one I thought it would be cool to make an alternate vocal version of her track instead of a remix.

“I conceptualized the track after watching the film Downtown 81. The fictionalized account of the New York art scene in the early ’80s drew parallels between that movie and our life here. The idea of Debbie Harry hanging out with Basquiat while Grandmaster Flash was DJing, is the reality that music doesn't have to have rigid social barriers; I related to that.  There's one scene in particular that resonated, where the character is walking around aimlessly and he goes into this party house in the middle of the day. There are like five people dancing to this hip-hop DJ playing “Rapture” by Blondie and there's an MC and he's just rhyming things with “81” over and over. It looks like the most fun party ever.

“Claire and I will definitely do something in the future; I have written a song with her in mind that I’d love to work on when we’re both back from tour, and she did a remix for the upcoming single from my new album.”