Edmonton rapper Cab’ral fuelled by superheroes, sci-fi
Edmonton rapper Cab’ral feels as though he’s on the hero’s journey.
“This is how the design gets created,” the 25-year-old northsider says over the phone with a certain degree of animation. “Statistically I’m not supposed to be where I’m at. Looking back at where I was supposed to go as opposed to where I’m going shows that the hero’s journey is real.”
In metaphorical terms Cab’ral is referring to his journey from wiseass Abbottsfield kid acting up in the classroom to disciplined artist with long-term goals. In practical terms he’s making preparations for a stint in New York City, where members of his new management team are helping him work out his future in the music industry. Journeys aren’t necessarily meant to be solo endeavours, after all.
Growing up in what he refers to as a “rough-around-the-edges” household, Cab’ral alludes to addiction issues and illness in his extended family.
“Nothing really made sense, and I came into this world questioning my reality. I didn’t know my father, and I was a different skin colour from the rest of my family. People didn’t understand me so I lashed out; not in a bad way, like breaking things, but I was one of those kids that needed the class to pay attention to me, so I’d start singing. I was told I was a bad kid but I knew I wasn’t.”
Cab’ral found a degree of solace in music, at first rock bands like Tool and Ozzy Osbourne, later hip-hop. A younger uncle got him into comic books, particularly Todd Mcfarlane’s Spawn, as well as Japanese anime like Dragonball Z. The Amazing Spider-man introduced Cab’ral to the notion of the hero’s journey, while Wolverine he enjoyed simply because the glowering mutant was “a badass.”
“It was the moral values of Spider-man that got me, though,” he says. “With great power comes great responsibility; that really informed my character.”
Young Cab’ral honed his developing skills in places like the Creative Clubhouse, where he first met promoter, friend, and future team member Nick Leeb. The songs kept coming, the ideas within them mutating like the comic book characters he looked up to. Pretty soon Cab’ral was on to visionary novelist Philip K. Dick and notions of perception.
“I watched (John Carpenter’s) In the Mouth of Madness and then looked up someone who had done a video essay on the film, which brought me to Philip K. Dick’s book The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. There were two hallucinogenic drugs in the book, Can-d and Chew-z, and I was blown away by the description of how they affected people in the book. I was like, wow, this world is a lot like ours.”
The three songs that make up Cab’ral’s debut EP Can-d Chew-z woozily follow the action of ingesting Dick’s drugs, which are meant as an act of escape. For the rapper it means much more, going back to his questions about the nature of reality and perception. Strange musings from a northside kid reared on Tupac and The Tea Party.
Over the last six months or so Cab’ral’s trajectory has been pointing skyward. He’s toured with Lil Mosey, worked with the likes of Joe Pascoe (No Wyld) and Woodro Skillson (Kid Cudi, Dai Burger), played a sold-out Winspear show with Paul Woida, and hooked up with some fairly heavy management in Broadway producer Kevin Mccollum and original Glee producer Michael Novick. He’s got a half-dozen mixtapes under his belt, and is currently working on two stylistically different projects, Castles in the Sky and Wicked City, due to drop in June of this year. His latest, Feel the Vibe, just hit 270,000 streams on Spotify.
An impressive start, but Cab’ral is quick to point out that his art isn’t exclusively about numbers and sales.
“If it was just about money I may as well work a job,” he states flatly. “I could work the rigs with my uncle and buy a car if that’s what it’s all about. For me it’s about expressing what I have inside, to show my soul. I want to get it out there so that people can remember that they also have a soul, a mind, a body, and we can connect again, look around, and realize that there’s something off about everything that’s happening.”