“Overconsumption, mass defection. So disruptive, disconnected … Let’s move into a high rise, highrise.” — Cadence Weapon

Urban life has long served as an inspiration for hip-hop artists. For Canadian rapper Cadence Weapon, it was the feeling that gentrification and a condo boom in downtown Toronto were stripping away community and connection that compelled the 32-year-old to write “High Rise.” The song is on his fourth album. The video was released Tuesday.

The rapper, also known as Rollie Pemberton, spoke with the Star about Toronto’s housing issues, city planning guru Jane Jacobs and the joy of running into neighbours at your local fruit stand.

What was “High Rise” based on?

Looking for an apartment in Toronto when me and my girlfriend moved from Montreal (in 2015). I lived in Montreal for six years and never had any trouble finding housing. (But in Toronto,) we looked at, I would say, 25 different apartments and houses before we eventually got one. We would do open houses with literally 100 people, in a driving rainstorm, and we are all there to look at the crawl space behind a house in Little Italy. I wanted to make a song from the perspective of a demonic, evil real estate agent who is dead set on destroying the fabric of urban communities. That was my idea … a song of resignation, let’s move into a highrise, let’s give up on living in a community.

What were you trying to show with the video?

Something that really felt unique and commented on my personal perspective of condo life and gentrification that was subtle, but also illuminating for people. Living in Montreal and Edmonton and coming to Toronto and seeing the kind of condoland, I find it feels a little oppressive to be in these spaces, so I wanted the video to reflect how I am feeling in these spaces.

What is community to you?

I live in Little Portugal (Dufferin St. and Dundas St. W. area). I feel like it is one of the best neighbourhoods in town. For me, community is seeing people organically doing things outside, you know, whether it is local businesses that have been around for decades or local characters. This feeling of history. That is something that I look for in places that I live.

People have to live somewhere, so what is the solution?

I think it is one of the big questions of our time, how do we reconcile what a lot of people would consider a good quality of life with being able to spread that quality of life to as many people as possible.

Plenty of people live in larger buildings, or older highrises in neighbourhoods like Parkdale. Can communities exist in those buildings?

Definitely. When I say highrise (in the song), it was just a different way of saying a condo. I feel like it is very hard to have an organic community in a condo. You have got your gym in there, you have got your Sobeys on the bottom floor, you can have a self-contained ecosystem — but I don’t think it is the same as a community.

I live in a condo. Will my building ever become a community?

It depends on what you want out of your life, basically. I’m used to living in houses and walking to the fruit stand and running into people I know all the time. Montreal is like a big village. I did briefly live in a condo in Toronto, when I was recording my last album in 2012. I liked having a basketball court … everything was so clean and uniform, but eventually it started making me depressed. I missed the kind of human engagement where you … would bump into people. Everywhere you look, there is a new condo coming and it is important to remember what Toronto used to be like. It used to be so dramatically different, it looked different and felt different.

Can all of us co-exist?

I think it is important that we do. I don’t want to make this a diss song to anybody living in a condo. It is more my perspective on quality of life. It is also about the capitalist aspect of real estate. That is really what I am commenting on. I have friends who live in condos and I get why people live in them. I do think we can all co-exist. You can come over to my house any time.

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We can all live together. Anything to add?

I might get a little Jane Jacobs with you. Another thing I think about condos and how they are constructed is they block the shoreline. That is something that really bothers me a lot. I think a lot about social engineering with regards to architecture and how it affects the actual environment outside of the condos, not just the inside. This isn’t just a Toronto story, this is something people in London, England can relate to, that people in New York can relate to. It’s just the story of big cities today.