K-OS
by Daniel Robert Epstein for SuicideGirls (http://suicidegirls.com/)

Though it may not seem like it to the Billboard Hot 100, hip-hop is going through a great period and K-OS is at the forefront of that. K-OS has been dropping rhymes on us since 1993 and has become one of the most respected MCs in the scene. Canadian born, the work of K-OS is a mixture of a number of influences including 80’s hip-hop and punk. His latest album is Atlantis: Hymns for Disco.

Buy Atlantis: Hymns for Disco

Daniel Robert Epstein: What’s happening today?

K-OS: We’re wading through New York traffic in a smelly van on our way to do an acoustic show.

DRE: You do a lot of acoustic shows, right?

K-OS: As of late we have but we’re going to be doing them on the road for sure.

DRE: What do you like about doing acoustic stuff?

K-OS: It puts all your shit in check as far as your vocals and you get to reinterpret the song. It’s fun to visit songs that have become bigger things. It helps you remember what you liked about them.

DRE: When you were creating the songs did you know you wanted to do them acoustically?

K-OS: I think it’s a cool safeguard. When I write them on piano or guitar, you can always go back to it. That’s the amazing thing about the songwriting process which I think is absent from hip-hop in a way. A lot of the hip-hop stuff I make starts off on a drum machine or a sample, when you actually put a song together it’s going to be in that original form regardless of whether you have drums so it’s always good to have that. It’s almost like you have a copy of a copy of the original copy. As long as you have that you always remember where you were when you painted it and I think that’s a good map.

DRE: Would you ever do an acoustic album?

K-OS: That’s snoozy to me sometimes. I think they’re good shows. I don’t know if I’d have fun doing a whole album of acoustic material. I don’t know if I’d have fun doing a whole album of any one type of music anyway. That’s my big problem right now, which is why my music’s all over the place. It’s like music schizophrenia. I’m all over the place all the time.

DRE: To keep it on the acoustic track, do you play instruments acoustically too?

K-OS: Yeah, I can. I can use the guitar once in a while and sometimes keyboard stuff. I don’t know any theory. I just gold rush.

DRE: When you sing or are rapping acoustically, do you have to slow it down?

K-OS: A lot of it is pretty much verbatim. The two or three songs that we’re doing today were acoustic songs before they even were in a studio.

DRE: What was the inspiration for Atlantis: Hymns for Disco?

K-OS: A lot of boredom, a lot of voyeurism, seeing a lot of bands play. For the past five years I’ve been listening to music outside of going to a hip-hop show or going out to see a hip-hop band. There was a lot of voyeurism where I was going out to see things I never got to see before. A friend of mine, Chris Harper, went to his first Dinosaur Jr show in like 80-something, these guys have been watching bands all their lives and here I was going out to bands and then I realized that maybe if there were ten bands like The Roots around when I was a kid I would have just seen them. That’s what really inspired the album, watching bands play. It’s that dynamic of five, six, seven or eight guys making some noise and making it their own. I tried to capture that.

DRE: What about the name Atlantis: Hymns for Disco itself?

K-OS: That’s stream of consciousness. The fable of that city is that they’re so involved in technological advancement that they lost track of their spirituality and their true intellectual capacity. I feel that way sometimes about MySpace or downloading songs. It seems like technology is getting out of hand. I’m sure people felt like that when radio or a Walkman first appeared. Sometimes I wonder if we’re careful enough with technology and the changes it’s going to evoke. I just called it Atlantis as a hopeful idea.

DRE: But yet, you are streaming your album online.

K-OS: Oh, for sure. That’s the greatest conflict of being somebody who’s not 16 years old. I wasn’t afraid of the Sony Walkman when it came out, I just wanted one. Then you become older and you forget the advancement. We were a generation with Walkmans, CDs, and VHS. Then when you get older you realize the technology you grew up with is becoming outdated and becomes the scary thing. You have to be very wary of those lines when it might become not about the music. I trust myself enough to know when to make those choices. Five years ago I got the chance to have my song, Crabbuckit, in an iPod commercial but I said no because it didn’t feel right to me. So I think I’ve made choices on both sides of the fence of getting involved with technology but that’s up to every artist.

DRE: Why did you turn down the iPod commercial?

K-OS: I didn’t own one. I knew nothing about it. Now I might go “Oh cool” because I live off my iPod and it’d be hypocritical not to. At the same time imagine being an artist in the 30’s or 40’s and someone hears you on the radio for the first time. I’m sure there were artists who were like, “I’m never recording stuff on the radio. I’m just a live player.” Artists make their choices based on their superstitions and their fears and some people move with the times like Bob Dylan plugging in a guitar. Other people said that was from the devil, but at the end of the day you have to trust yourself to know what’s good for you. I can’t dis anybody who did an iPod commercial because maybe they already had iPods. Maybe they saw the joy of it. For me, I didn’t own one so I didn’t understand it, so it wasn’t for me. That’s probably why they wanted that song because they saw somebody who maybe didn’t really own an iPod. I don’t know what I would do if they wanted to use a song now.

DRE: How do you think it will be touring with Gym Class Heroes?

K-OS: It’s as if The Pharcyde, A Tribe called Quest and De La Soul had live bands. That’s how I see this tour. It is a bunch of bands who a few years ago would be doing their shows over DAT but now everyone has a band, so is it different? Yes, it’s way easier to see the differences between bands when they have a live band because you can hear the difference in the sound. I saw the Gym Class Heroes video and I thought it looked like The Pharcyde with the sensibilities and humor it had, that juvenile cartoon aspect. I was down with it because I definitely saw that 90’s hip-hop vibe.

DRE: What’s the Canadian hip-hop scene like now?

K-OS: It’s a scene that was very flourishing in the 90’s with guys like Socrates, The Rascals, Frankenstein, a lot of bands doing stuff. I think everyone’s pretty much in the lab right now reassessing. They’re just trying to figure out what they’re going to do because it’s a different time. Aside from, the south taking over hip-hop, people are probably just trying to just get used to technology. Having home studios and recording their stuff at home and trying to make it sound good. But I think in the next two or three years we’re going to see a whole new guard of Canadian hip-hop artists come out and affecting the world. In particular, Socrates, who happens to be a forefather.

DRE: I read that you see a real correlation between the hip-hop attitude and the punk rock attitude.

K-OS: I think that music is always better if you are completely yourself. Are reggae and punk rock congruent? They’re not harmonically the same but you always respect the guys in punk, reggae and hip-hop. That’s where I see the correlation. It is also a place where people can speak out on a lifestyle or a type of idea that’s not in the mainstream. If you do it honestly it could be embraced by the mainstream like the Sex Pistols and Public Enemy. They both were anti-establishment but they were so good at it that the mainstream had to go, “Yeah, I like these guys.” So I think that’s where the punk rock and hip-hop ideas are the same. But then again, sometimes I feel like the kids doing punk rock and hip-hop now are the little brothers of these kids who really experienced it.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck

web address: http://suicidegirls.com/words/K-OS/