"Americans Aren’t Aware of Anything Outside of America:" An Interview With K-Os

by Andy Hermann

To the rest of the world, the words "Canadian hip-hop" probably go together about as well as "lowfat cheesecake." Can a nation famous for its niceness produce music with enough bite to please rap fans in New York and Atlanta? For an artist like K-Os (pronounced "Chaos"), that's not the point. This Trinidad-born, Toronto-bred rapper/singer/songwriter is less interested in bling-bling and street cred than he is in exploring hip-hop's outer limits, both as music and as an evolving cultural movement. In the tradition of boundary-breakers like OutKast and The Roots, his songs avoid simple beats and synth lines in favor of rich, surprising arrangements that owe as much to pop, old-school R&B, funk, jazz and even rock 'n' roll as they do to conventional hip-hop. And in the tradition of controversial rappers like KRS-One and Nas, he's not afraid to speak his mind about subjects both deeply personal and fiercely political. And yes, he's proud to be Canadian. Maybe that's why so far, American audiences haven't yet embraced him, even though his music is perhaps catchier and more accessible than most of what dominates the Billboard rap charts. But K-Os doesn't mind. As he claims below, it's all going according to plan.

You’ve been very, very successful in Canada, but it seems like here in the States, for whatever reason, your music hasn’t quite caught on yet.

I think it’s kinda cool that my record is being recognized by people like yourself first, by music lovers. Because often things by record companies are pushed down people’s throats to the point where it never gets to marinate with the people who can really get into it and love it. So if my album had come out on a grandiose level in the States I don’t think it really would have had a chance to build. When it does, it’s gonna reach a lot of people. So I’m not really that nervous or upset about that. Plus I think I’m making some very bold comments on this record about American culture and the state of hip-hop, and I think America, having the type of personality it does -- I don’t think it reacts very well to someone criticizing, someone from outside the country saying you guys aren’t on some sh*t. Songs like “B-Boy Stance” and “Love Song”....This Canadian kid’s coming in and saying, “your hip-hop’s pretty, you know, banal right now.” Who’s really gonna support that? Hot 97? Not really. But I know the consequences of speaking my mind and I’m okay with that.

What do you think are the big problems facing mainstream (i.e. American) hip-hop right now? Is it just that it’s become a money game or do the problems run deeper than that?

It’s because people have stepped to hip-hop knowing what they’re trying to be. Whereas in the early ‘80s, you had all these groups, these anomalies, coming out because they were sampling records from different types of music and things just happened. Now everybody’s just waking up in the morning and creating music that they think is hip-hop...because they are trying to be something based on what’s on the radio or TV rather than just going to their basement and just feeling out their own vibe.

I think it’s interesting that over the last couple of years, your typical hip-hop record will have like eight different producers, and yet they tend to sound more homogenous than hip-hop records that came out 10 years ago when more artists produced their own tracks.

Yeah, it’s true. And that’s another thing...the fact that sampling died. The powers that be [decided] that to sample a record was stealing, [and] killed that dynamic of allowing grassroots artists to do their thing. Because everyone was so concerned about whether they were gonna get sued or how much money they were gonna make off their record. Everyone starts to think about that, and the whole thing changed.

You don’t use a whole lot of sampling on Joyful Rebellion. Did you used to use samples a lot more when you were first starting out, before you switched to more live instrumentation?

Well I think that’s why now I can use live instrumentation, and know how to produce a song live and make it sound like a sample. Because that’s all I [used to do]: sample from my Dad’s Thelonius Monk and Crusaders records. But he’d really get up into me about that, started telling me, “no, no, don’t do that. What are your kids gonna sample, a sample?” So I got away from that when I first saw The Roots play at the Opera House in Toronto. It blew my mind and I knew that that was the next evolution of things.

I think a lot of American hip-hop fans aren’t even really aware that Canada has a hip-hop scene.

A lot of American people aren’t aware of anything outside of America. That’s the problem with America -- that people are so insular and everything’s always so about New York or L.A.. They don’t give a chance for things to come in outside of that. That’s the problem with the industry as it is. It’s not that people are bad or they’re selfish, but the industry mostly eats off of itself and when you keep eating off yourself, pretty soon you’re gonna run out of material. That’s why American hip-hop music is not at the apex of its evolution, because everybody just wants to keeping doing insular moves.

Can you tell us a little about the hip-hop scene up in Canada? Is it pretty vibrant or are you one of the few?

I think there’s downtime right now. I think a lot of people are reassessing how they’re gonna come at it. There’s a lot of bands, from The Rascalz to Swollen Members to Kardinal to The Cirkle to Choclair. And then you’ve got guys like Ghetto Concept and stuff like that. So there’s a lot of bands. Everybody’s sort of wondering what to do now, because we’re at that point where we realize we’re not Americans. And so everyone’s trying to figure out how they’re gonna come with a style and grace that is not a replication of an American hip-hop [act]. And that’s where everyone’s at, and I’m sure everyone’s in the lab experimenting with those experiences. And on an underground level, just on a street level, there’s always something happening in this city [Toronto] with DJs. It’s the best place in the world for me to go out on a Monday or a Tuesday or a Wednesday night and hear hip-hop in a club that I just love. That’s one thing about Toronto and Montreal and also Vancouver -- if you know the spots, you can go out and experiment and check shit out.

I’ve been hearing a lot of great new bands and great new music coming out of Canada just in general: The Arcade Fire, Sam Roberts.

There’s also Metric and Broken Social Scene. People are calling Toronto the new Seattle and it’s not a lie. There’s a lot happening.

You worked with rocker Sam Roberts on this album, so I gather the scenes aren’t very insular.

I grew up in the suburbs around people like Sam and vibes like that. So a little secret to my success in Canada is that I’ve been able to assimilate into the independent rock scene and still remain a hip-hop kid. Because I know those people, I know what they’re about and I know how to vibe with them. And I think that could be a problem for some other artists is that they didn’t really grow up listening to U2 or Siouxsie & the Banshees or The Clash. They see that as rock music and there’s this taboo in hip-hop, that you just don’t do rock.

Right. You can’t use guitars because then it’s not hip-hop.

No distortion, no distortion. But my next record’s gonna be all about distortion in hip-hop. And melding those things together like it’s never been done on the most beautiful level.

You mention KRS-One a couple of times in your liner notes so obviously he’s a big influence on you. Who are some of your other big musical influences, both inside hip-hop and outside?

Rakim, Nasir Jones, Black Thought from The Roots, Jimi Hendrix, The Clash, The Police.

I definitely hear some Michael Jackson on “Man I Used to Be.”

Yeah, I was just gonna say that. Michael Jackson, Prince. All those people, man, the list goes on and on and on. The Beatles, wow -- heavy, heavy, heavy into The Beatles.

I can’t think of anyone in American hip-hop who’s using orchestras and Spanish guitar -- there’s just all kinds of sounds on this album that you don’t really associate with a hip-hop record, but they work.

Yeah, it's cool, that had a lot to do with my band. The orchestra stuff I had a fetish for from listening to Beatles music. I wanted to bring that George Martin sophistication to production, like on a song like "Eleanor Rigby," which is so dark but uses orchestra so well. And as far as the Spanish guitar, my guitar player [Russell Klyne] is a big fan of Pepe Romero and Shakti with John McLaughlin, and really a guitar virtuoso, and he's a big part of my musical evolution because he's so amazing at what he does.

And you play some guitar yourself.

Yeah, that's still something I'm a little bit posing with, but I have to go through this posing stage to actually get good at it. Because I am starting to play onstage and trying to do things. Hopefully in two or three years I'll get my head around it, to the point where I feel like I can hold it down. I love the guitar.

How did you get the name K-Os?

It stands for "Kheaven's Original Sound." I really like the word "chaos" because it really doesn't have a meaning, it's kind of a word people use to describe things when they don't know what the f*ck's happening. I sort of like that element, where it's a word that really didn't have a meaning, it meant almost anything and it probably meant something negative. But you can have chaos too where it's like, "everyone was just having a good time and it was chaotic!" You don't need to use it in a negative way and I sort of liked that element too, that it has a negative connotation but you can use it in a positive sense.

You're obviously a man who thinks a lot about philosophy and politics and puts that into your music, and yet your music remains very accessible. How do you balance that -- putting some deep, fairly complex messages into the music but at the same time not letting it get too pretentious or arty?

Because I love pop music, man. I always have. I love the Top 40, I love good melodies, I love some corny sh*t that sometimes sounds good but doesn't mean anything...[sings] "doo doo doo, dah dah dah." I love that sh*t. I grew up with that. I know how glorified it was as a 12-year-old kid to turn on the radio and want to tape my favorite song onto a cassette tape. I never think of myself as an art snob or somebody who has to make music so that mainstream, regular people don't like it. In fact, I find it more of a challenge to make music that mainstream people do like, that the more obscure underground lovers have to like too, because they're like, "Well, it's just f*cking cool."

16 February 04

"Make You Uncomfortable" For years, Nicolas Cage has taken roles that would make other actors empty their lunches into their limos. He proclaims his independence in Morphizm's In Their Own Words. . . . MORE	A World Without Bodies We're heading for a future without flesh. And though suicide bombers use it for leverage on the evening news, it'll never be more than electronic to us. Morphizm's newest columnist Nathan Means keeps it hyperreal . . . MORE	"It's Amazing I've Survived" Bill Plympton's latest self-drawn exercise in physiological agency and madness takes the animator back to high school in search of hormones and Volkswagen-humping mascots. Our interview elaborates . . . . MORE
"Sea of Trivia" If you're looking to fit in during an endless War on Terror, the last thing you do is make a film about a guy who wants to kill the president. But if you're Assassination of Richard Nixon director Niels Mueller, you make the movie you want to make, and hope Sean Penn is in it . . . MORE	Body and Soul Long before he was the auteur behind A Man Escaped and Lancelot of the Lake, French director Robert Bresson spent a year suffocating beneath Nazi occupation. How he got labeled an optimist is another story . . . MORE	You Break It, You Pay For It Americans are notoriously tight with their money, but they see no problem in shelling out billions for a war they don't want. That's because no matter how shattered Iraq is, the American occupation will never go broke . . . MORE