''Breaking Kayfabe'' is the debut album by Canadian

rapper Rapping (also rhyming, spitting, emceeing or MCing) is a musical form of vocal delivery that incorporates "rhyme, rhythmic speech, and street vernacular". It is performed or chanted, usually over a backing beat or musical accompaniment. The ...

Cadence Weapon Roland "Rollie" Pemberton, better known by his stage name Cadence Weapon, is a Canadian-American rapper based in Toronto, Ontario. Born and raised in Edmonton, Alberta, Pemberton released his first album, ''Breaking Kayfabe'', in 2005 with positi ...

, released in 2005 on

Upper Class Recordings Upper Class Recordings is a Canadian independent record label founded in 2000 in Toronto, Ontario. The electronic music-based Upper Class roster includes The Russian Futurists, Cadence Weapon, DVAS, Christien Summers and The Cansecos. History ...

. It was also released in the United States by

Anti-Records Anti- is an American record label founded in 1999 as a sister label to Epitaph Records. While Epitaph's focus has mostly been on punk rock, Anti-'s roster includes gospel (Mavis Staples), country (Merle Haggard), hip hop (Sage Francis, The Cou ...

on March 13, 2007. ''

Breaking kayfabe ''Breaking Kayfabe'' is the debut album by Canadian rapper Cadence Weapon, released in 2005 on Upper Class Recordings. It was also released in the United States by Anti-Records on March 13, 2007. '' Breaking kayfabe'' is a professional wrestling t ...

'' is a

professional wrestling Professional wrestling is a form of theater that revolves around staged wrestling matches. The mock combat is performed in a ring similar to the kind used in boxing, and the dramatic aspects of pro wrestling may be performed both in the ring o ...

term for "

breaking character In theatre (especially in the illusionistic Western tradition), breaking character occurs when an actor ceases to maintain the illusion that they are identical with the character they are portraying. This is a more acceptable occurrence while in ...

". ''Breaking Kayfabe'' received positive reviews from critics who praised the 8-bit style beats and intellectual lyrics meshing well together. The album was shortlisted for the

2006 Polaris Music Prize The inaugural edition of the Canadian Polaris Music Prize presented on September 18, 2006, at Toronto's Phoenix Concert Theatre. The winning album was Final Fantasy's '' He Poos Clouds''. Nominees The prize's list of 10 finalist albums, chosen f ...

. However, it lost to

Final Fantasy is a Japanese video game, Japanese science fantasy anthology media franchise created by Hironobu Sakaguchi and developed and owned by Square Enix (formerly Square (video game company), Square). The franchise centers on a series of fantasy and ...

's ''

He Poos Clouds ''He Poos Clouds'' is the second album by the Canadian indie rocker Owen Pallett, released on June 13, 2006, on Blocks Recording Club in Canada and Tomlab internationally. The songs on the album (excluding the fifth and tenth tracks) are loose ...

''.

Critical reception

''Breaking Kayfabe'' garnered highly positive reviews from

music critic ''The Oxford Companion to Music'' defines music criticism as "the intellectual activity of formulating judgments on the value and degree of excellence of individual works of music, or whole groups or genres". In this sense, it is a branch of mus ...

s. At

Metacritic Metacritic is a website that review aggregator, aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted arithmetic mean, weighted average). M ...

, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an

average In ordinary language, an average is a single number taken as representative of a list of numbers, usually the sum of the numbers divided by how many numbers are in the list (the arithmetic mean). For example, the average of the numbers 2, 3, 4, 7, ...

score of 80, based on 9 reviews. Francis Jones of

Drowned in Sound ''Drowned in Sound'', sometimes abbreviated to ''DiS'', is a UK-based music webzine financed by artist management company Silentway. Founded by editor Sean Adams, the site features reviews, news, interviews, and discussion forums. History ''D ...

praised the songs for having both production and lyrics feel equal and unique, calling it "a record that demands and deserves undivided attention, its creator fashioning a brain-searing patchwork of ragged rap, electronic flourishes and truncated rhythms." Marisa Brown of

AllMusic AllMusic (previously known as All Music Guide and AMG) is an American online music database. It catalogs more than three million album entries and 30 million tracks, as well as information on musicians and bands. Initiated in 1991, the databas ...

also praised Cadence for crafting electro beats over tracks that carry intelligent lyrics, concluding that "''Breaking Kayfabe'' is a cohesive set of songs, backpacker in the best of senses, smart and witty and provocative, experimental and well-produced, but at the same time very raw and very real-sounding. It's not often that a debut does all this correctly; listeners would be wise to pay attention." Peter Macia of ''

Pitchfork A pitchfork (also a hay fork) is an agricultural tool with a long handle and two to five tines used to lift and pitch or throw loose material, such as hay, straw, manure, or leaves. The term is also applied colloquially, but inaccurately, to th ...

'' gave praise to Cadence foregoing hip-hop conventions and instead worked on smart lyricism and video game-inspired production, concluding that it "may not be his masterpiece, but it hints that he may be capable of one." Ian Mathers of

Stylus Magazine ''Stylus Magazine'' was an American online music and film magazine, launched in 2002 and co-founded by Todd L. Burns. It featured long-form music journalism, four daily music reviews, movie reviews, podcasts, an MP3 blog, and a text blog. Addi ...

noted that the production starts to sound droll at first but found it and the lyricism shining bright after a few listens, concluding with, "Too exciting for the underground (maybe), too weird for the overground (hopefully not), he deserves to be heard by both; I'm willing to bet it's all because he's Canadian."

Track listing

References

2005 albums Cadence Weapon albums Upper Class Recordings albums {{2005-hiphop-album-stub