Wordburglar: Burglaritis

“Like Rick Mercer, I was Made in Canada,” says Wordburglar, but you don’t need him to tell you that with references like, well, that one. I’m just saying, “no one really cares about you, like the Grey Cup” wouldn’t make it onto an American rapper’s dis track, and “I’m not Tim Horton, but you can roll the rim” wouldn’t work as innuendo if you’re from… well, maybe anywhere at all. All it does for me is make me a bit leery of my iced cap.

As though it’s not painfully obvious, I’ll state right now that I don’t know anything about rap. At all. Listening to rap brings back memories of Grade 10 and being the fattest, whitest, nerdiest kid to ever wear a Public Enemy t-shirt. I reflect on these memories with an equal mixture of fondness and horror. Now I write proposals to sell telephone systems to small and medium-sized businesses, and when I meet with one of the manager types at work, we trade verses of Bring Tha Noize in our cubicles. Speaking of “nerdiest.”

So while I have no real credibility when trying to determine whether or not this album is technically any good, I sure do find it to be pretty fun. The nerdiness factor comes into play again, as Wordburglar is a comic-book geek who shuns rhymes about life on the streets in favour of references to Tri-Clops and “an eBay auction for a mint-in-box Mossman.”

Speaking of eBay, it has teamed with Amazon and iTunes to take all the fun out of record shopping. I heard about Wordburglar and wanted to check out the CD, so when Aaron was heading into Toronto, I asked him to find this for me. He went to several record stores and asked clerks for help in locating the Wordburglar CD. He had no luck, but I gather he did get some weird looks. Fun for him? Maybe not, but reading his account of the trip was fun for me. Then I just bought the damn thing on iTunes. iTunes gave me no funny looks. iTunes doesn’t judge.

“You wanna play Zeus, but that was Tiny Lister.” He-Man characters, miscellaneous Canadiana, and references to bad wrestling? No wonder I like this.

Tags: album reviews, music, wordburglar