I’m so amped they dropped a video for this. I Wish I Knew Natalie Portman is one of my favorite tracks off K-os’ latest album “Yes!” – which is in the running for my favorite album of 2009. This track features fellow Canadian hip-hop superstar Saukrates.

K-os “Yes!” Album Review
K-os is an artist who is just constantly evolving. His first three albums, each a classic in my mind, showed K-os on a different musical journey. And after where he took his last effort, “Atlantis: Hymns for Disco,” I couldn’t really imagine what he had left in him. Where could K-os possibly go next? Well, with “Yes!” K-os has proven that his evolution is not yet complete, and that he is incapable of making a less than spectacular album. And even better for HHL followers, “Yes!” seems to be more hip-hop based than his past couple of albums.

Why I Like This Album?

1. It’s electro – I’m a hip-hop fan who doesn’t want to hear the same thing over and over again. Maybe that’s why I’m such a big fan of K-os. To me, K-os’ production – which despite his array of past sounds has always been very instrumental and perhaps even folk-ish – is much more futuristically electronic this time around. Tracks like Zambony, Astronaut, Eye Know Something, The Aviator and Mr. Telephone Man demonstrate this electronic feel and will have you bumping your head. This sound works out well for K-os, who rhymes more than he sings on these tracks. And while I can dig both, there’s nothing like listening to emcees spit over tight beats.

2. It reps Vancouver – Right before I picked up this album, I read an article about how K-os moved to Vancouver to record most of the tracks for “Yes!” Some of my favorite albums were recorded and clearly influenced by being created in a place away from home (the best example that comes to mind is the Living Legends’ “Classic” which was created in Maui). So when I hear a lot of the songs, I envision dude in the city living the fast life and shit. Or maybe that’s because I’m in the city living the fast life and shit. Either way, I like the influence Vancouver has apparently had on K-os’ music.

3. It makes me dance – Yeah I’m gay. But a couple times recently, I’ve jumped the train home from work, smoked one (I’m quitting tomorrow), and thrown on this album. I cook dinner and dance around the house like Molly Ringwald in The Breakfast Club (like you never have), because there are definitely some cranks on this album. Tracks like Burning Bridges, Uptown Girl, I Wish I Knew Natalie Portman, 4321, FUN!, WhipC.R.E.A.M and The Avenue might have you busting a move for real.

4. Rhymes are dope – I gotta relate at least one of my reasons to the music itself. And as usual, K-os’ lyrics and flow are on point. There are dope rhymes, sing along choruses and quotable lyrics all over this album. One good example is the following verse from Burning Bridges:

Turn on the light/
‘Cause the left hand knows what you’re doing with your right/
When the right hand glows, left is jealous of the light/
So you put ‘em both together and you clap for your life/
Time – that’s why I’m back in the building/
To burn through flame the thing that I was building/
Get off the bridge all the women and children/
Fire pros/
Sheep’s in wolves clothes/

The Aviator is a self-reflective track in which K-os drops two dope verses off inner dialogue and questioning. The following verse from that song is a good example of this:

Who am I using?/
Who is abusing?/
Who isn’t choosing?/
Who am I sleeping on that I’m confusing?/
Who is my muse? She probably plays the guitar/
Probably 4th dimensional, probably living bars/
So many scars young black boy in my room/
Made my style animated, call my style cartoon/
That you bump when you’re driving up the coastline/
The closed mind exposed by the sunshine/
Designed by the most high/

One of my favorite songs lyrically was former HHL track of the week Mr. Telephone Man. In that song, K-os drops the following verse that seems to point to how human relationships are being affected by improving technology.

We went from pagers, beepers, phones, to creepers/
Ringtones, text messages, not reaching/
Speaking close all up in my receiver/
Afraid to meet in person the dial tone deceiver/
Pick up, hang up, break up, banger/
Man I wanna press every button Atlanta/
Area code South Beach number I forgot it/
We cross bionic style exotic forget about it/
Now here’s what I’m thinking/
Is this ship sinking?/
While we’re dancing and drinking/
Could we be at the brink and?/

Overall: Probably my favorite album of 2009 – and that’s saying a lot. I like every song on this album, and I have a different favorite daily. If you haven’t already, pick up a copy of this album. Favorite tracks include I Wish I Knew Natalie Portman, Mr. Telephone Man, Uptown Girl, Eye Know Something, The Aviator. Really all of them. Peace.

Album Track Listing:

1. Zambony
2. Astronaut
3. Burning Bridges
4. Uptown GirL
5. I Wish I Knew Natalie Portman
6. 4321
7. Eye Know Something
8. The Aviator
9. FUN!
10.  Mr. Telephone Man
11. WhipC.R.E.A.M.
12.  The Avenue

Official music video for 4 3 2 1, a track from k-os’ new album “Yes!” – which I’ve been bumping nonstop for like 2 weeks now.

This week’s hip-hop quotable is k-os’ Mr. Telephone Man from his latest album “Yes!” It was very difficult to pick just one track to feature from this album, as I have a different favorite pretty much every day, so I chose Mr. Telephone Man for my hip-hoppers that want k-os to rap more. This track has a dope beat and a couple dope verses, and I’m still trying to figure out what it means – though I do have a couple theories. Maybe you can help? Click below to listen to the track:

[See post to listen to audio]

And be sure to follow along with the lyrics after the break.

[Verse 1]
I keep it rocking now knocking on heaven’s door/
Looking for answers from a Femme fatale hardcore/
What am I looking for?/
I just don’t know/
I orchestrate flows but not for dough/
And really though/
I got a triple seven area code/
From the side of the road/
About way past suppertime/
Bust a rhyme on her/
To alleviate the drama/
But the more that I explore her/
It’s double I feel ignore her/
Ant on the hill, a worker bee to the queen/
Of vocabulary arts burning hearts of human beings/
True human becoming I’m running/
But cunning the number one stunner/
Persona is chaseable/
Making one replaceable/
And damn every time I think I want to face her/
With some tickets to the ball standing in the elevator/
On my way to her palace I get up to the seventh floor/
Then jet to the fire exit door with faith no more/

[Chorus]
Mr. Telephone Man won’t you help me with my line/
When I call the triple seven I get machine every time/
And I wonder if it’s possible you’re playing with my mind/
And I really want to know you won’t you please give me a sign/
And whoa it’s a long way down/
Said whoa it’s a long way down from the fall from grace/

[Verse 2]
We went from pagers, beepers, phones, to creepers/
Ringtones, text messages, not reaching/
Speaking close all up in my receiver/
Afraid to meet in person the dial tone deceiver/
Pick up, hang up, break up, banger/
Man I wanna press every button Atlanta/
Area code South Beach number I forgot it/
We cross bionic style exotic forget about it/
Now here’s what I’m thinking/
Is this ship sinking?/
While we’re dancing and drinking/
Could we be at the brink and?/
Mr. Telephone Man I call you every night/
You never answer my call I’m starting to get uptight/
I guess I’ll keep rhyming designing and flipping the script/
And dancing on my own time/
In my own mind but wait/
It seems this Mr. Telephone Man/
Is a woman with a man in the palm of her hand damn/

[Chorus]
Mr. Telephone Man won’t you help me with my line/
When I call the triple seven I get machine every time/
And I wonder if it’s possible you’re playing with my mind/
And I really want to know you won’t you please give me a sign/
And whoa it’s a long way down/
Said whoa it’s a long way down from the fall from grace/

[Outro]
I said I really want to have a talk/
Get your hands off my mic don’t grab it off/
I said I really want to have a talk/
Get your hands off my mic don’t grab it off/
I said I really want to have a talk/
Get your hands off my mic don’t grab it off/
I said I really want to have a talk/
Get your hands off my mic don’t grab it off/

His new album is called “Yes!,” but K-os could just as easily have called it “Home!,” because that’s where the rapper and singer has been headed for at least a year: Home to hip hop, and home to Vancouver, a city he had never lived in but that suddenly last summer revealed a claim on him that he couldn’t refuse.

The return to hip hop is clear from the first moments of “Yes!,” in which K-os (Kheaven Brereton) comes back to the rhymes, rhythms and production techniques he put aside for his pop-oriented 2006 album “Atlantis: Hymns for Disco.” If only because of what it was not, “Atlantis” seemed to crystallize K-os’s complaints against hip hop, and made him everybody’s favourite source when the genre’s flaws and future came up for discussion.

“I became this poster-person, the representative from my culture who’s rebelling against my culture,” he said, during a conversation in in Toronto. “I got sick of this question, ‘What do you think of the state of hip hop?’… When you become famous on your block or in your country for speaking out against hip hop, you have to realize that at some point you loved it. Rapping is the folk music and the punk-rock music of my people. If I don’t have 808s [a drum machine], if I’m not bouncing, I’m not really being myself. I had to find a way to make hip hop music that I loved. I think I had to do Atlantis so that I could love hip hop again.”

It sounds straightforward, but it was a hard thing to come around to, because K-os is a bit of a fighter, who has sometimes put obstacles in his own way. He got a version of that diagnosis from his new manager, Nettwerk’s Terry McBride, who let the news trickle in gently.

“I think he never said this, but this is sort of Terry’s thesis: If you’re an artist, why is there so much ego surrounding your thing?” K-os said. “If you’re confident about what you do, if you’re so different and original, why do I sense so much struggle?”

It turns out that struggle, in K-os’s life, is partly a geographical thing. Some time last year, he realized that his recordings to date split fairly evenly between those made in Toronto and those made in Vancouver (with a bunch more from “Atlantis” made in Halifax), and that for him Vancouver was the place where he could most readily take the gentle path.

“I’d been dating Vancouver for 10 years, and when I went there to record last summer, I felt like I was home,” he said. “By January 1st, I had a place there.”

The kind of recording he did that summer was relatively unplanned and free-flowing. He got together a bunch of players he had worked with in the past, and they jammed for two days. Those improvised sessions were the basis for Yes!, which needed very little additional recording, he said. It was a way of working that he would find almost inconceivable in Toronto.

“It’s very interesting what happens when you do something experimental in Vancouver, and then you come back and listen to it on your computer at your place at Richmond and Portland [in Toronto],” he said. “You start asking questions you don’t ask in Vancouver, like: ‘What are you really trying to say? Get to the point. That’s cool that you’re jamming, but is there a song structure here? Is it radio-friendly?’ You start unabashedly asking those questions.

“In Vancouver, it’s easy, it’s live music, it’s the water, it’s the mountains, and you can hear that vibe in the music. … In Toronto, when I come here, it’s like: CMW, buzz bands, who’s hot? The trends are coming in very quickly, and that affects your ability to trail off and improvise. So that’s how Toronto affected those songs from Vancouver. It’s very good for checks and balances.”

Being in those cities, in short, is for him a way of visiting or liberating different sides of his personality. It’s also about plugging into different kinds of music scenes, because the players in those towns, he finds, display very different attitudes about collaboration and getting ahead.

“Musicians in Vancouver are like gazelles, you have to coax them out of the forest,” he said. “They’re very wary of corporate stuff. Whereas people move to Toronto just to get a gig.” He has called musicians in Vancouver for a recording session, and been told that, no, that day won’t work because the kids are around. Maybe next record.

You can hear K-os trying to embrace his Vancouver side in songs like Astronaut, in which he sees himself coming down from another galaxy to make hip hop new again; or in Burning Bridges, in which he recalls worrying about what other people thought, as if that were definitely a past phase. You can hear his Toronto mind breaking in on tracks such as Zambony, in which he defines his post- “Atlantis” stance: “I am not indie rock, I’m West-Indie hip hop.”

But though the compass needle has swung around, Yes! still includes ample traces of rock and pop, and even echoes of classical music – partly an after-effect of a 2005 collaboration between K-os and the CBC Radio Orchestra.

The connection with his new manager has also started to redefine K-os’s relationship with his public. An open remix contest made songs from Yes! available in advance to fans to mess with however they pleased; the best of the results are coming out on a full album of “Yes! “remixes. Admission to K-os’s first batch of cross-Canada tour dates, which begin tomorrow in Vancouver, is on a “pay-what-you-want” basis. After a transient period when K-os was between labels and between managers, he sees McBride (who he describes as “very Zen”) as a wise counsellor who arrived in the nick of time.

“Terry McBride and David Suzuki are like Obi-Wan Kenobi figures in my life, where the dark side is looming, and you can’t find your way, and here are two guys who have seen so much,” said K-os, who got to know Suzuki through his daughter. He wishes he had met McBride five years ago, though he also thinks that things are working out more smoothly than if he had planned everything from the start. His years of struggle, of the inner-directed kind at least, seem to be over.

“I’m happier now,” he said, “because hip hop is in my life.” As he more or less says in The Avenue, the closing song on “Yes!,” hip hop is the girlfriend who waited for him to stop fooling around, and to start showing the unconditional love she deserves.

Source:
GlobeandMail.com

This is a remix of K-os’ Sunday Morning, one of my favorite tracks from his classic album “Atlantis: Hymns for Disco.” Remixed by Fashawn for his upcoming mixtape “Higher Learning.” Click below to listen:

[See post to listen to audio]

This is that first list – the overall top picks for 2007. The list below represents the best albums hip-hop had to offer in the year 2007 from what we consider major record labels – whether mainstream, underground or independent. We highly recommend checking them all out!

The Best Hip-Hop Albums of 2007:

1. Blu & Exile – Below The Heavens
2. K-OS – Atlantis: Hymns for Disco
3. X-Clan – Return From Mecca
4. Aesop Rock – None Shall Pass
5. C Rayz Walz – Chorus Rhyme
6. Little Brother – Getback
7. Talib Kweli – Eardrum
8. El-P – I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead
9. Brother Ali – The Undisputed Truth
10. Wise Intelligent – The Talented Timothy Taylor
11. NYOIL – Hood Treason
12. Public Enemy – How You Sell Soul To A Soulless People Who Sold Their Souls???
13. Common – Finding Forever
14. Sage Francis – Human the Death Dance
15. KRS-One & Marley Marl – Hip Hop Lives

In addition, we’d like to make a special shout out to Kanye West’s “Graduation,” which didn’t make the list simply because it made everyone else’s and we’re trying to hip y’all to some different shit, and One Be Lo’s “The R.E.B.I.R.T.H.” which didn’t make the list because it dropped after this list was compiled and will definitely be among the top picks for 2008.

If you haven’t done so already, pick up each album on this list. They are all examples of dope conscious hip-hop! Click here to view our list of the top 10 albums from minor independent labels or unsigned artists. Happy new year and PEACE!

K-os “Atlantis: Hymns for Disco” Album Review
Well, K-os has done it again … “Atlantis: Hymns for Disco” is his third classic album in just three tries, and has solidified his spot as one of my top ten emcees of all time. He is one of very few rappers who has the unique ability to blend opposites so easily. He is both serious and fun. Both conscious and perplexed. Both classically-influenced and currently-influential. Both hip-hop and bigger than hip-hop. His music goes beyond any genre, and represents the true correlation that can exist between artist, soul and sound.

Hip-Hop & Mythology
And in the process, K-os talks about some wonderfully magnificent and intelligent topics. “Atlantis: Hymns for Disco” has several mythological references. In one song, he references Isis, the queen goddess of Egyptian mythology who represents the role of mother and wife. In another, he references King Midas, a character in Greek mythology who had the ability to turn everything he touched into gold. In yet another, K-os references Valhalla, a hall in Norse mythology that is the home for those slain gloriously in battle, and valkyries, the female deities who carried the most heroic warriors to the hall where they became spirits. And let’s not forget the album title Atlantis, which was an island in Greek philosophy that supposedly sunk into the sea after a failed attempt to invade Athens, yet which is generally seen as a myth created by Plato in order to illustrate his political theories. Interesting stuff, huh?

Time, Space and the Big Bang
Yet there was one series of thoughts that seemed to keep coming up song after song in “Atlantis: Hymns for Disco.” Throughout several tracks, K-os talked about time, space, the universe and the mind, and the correlation that all may have with each other, with life, and with music. Confusing, huh? I agree, and to be honest with you, I don’t really understand a lot of what K-os is saying . but it’s got me trying to figure it out.

In separate tracks, K-os defines time as “a thief that leaves nothing behind” and life as “a mystery” that could be “the end of all history.” In others, he believes that his music is “broadcast from the universe” and that his humanity is derived from the recognition of “magnetic attraction pulling light down to this physical fraction.” And K-os consistently contemplates the beginnings of existence, a time when “the light shined so bright,” claiming that “we fell from the sky and universe” and that “we were all born in the flame.”

A lot of these statements made me think about some stuff I was reading recently about the Big Bang Theory. Big Bang is the dominant scientific theory about the origin of our universe, our galaxy, our planet, and basically, the origin of us. According to this theory, the universe was created sometime between 10 and 20 billion years ago after a cosmic explosion hurled matter in all directions. Now apparently, the big bang resulted in mass abundances of elements, mainly 75% hydrogen, 25% helium and some miniscule percentage of trace elements. These elements eventually cooled and expanded to create the galaxies, the stars and the planets.

Now maybe I’m looking at this from way too much of a simplistic perspective, but to me this means that everything in this universe is essentially composed of the same elements . hydrogen and helium. Everything around us, from the sun and stars to the food we eat and that blunt you’re smoking on is composed of the same basic elements that are just different compositions of matter. So maybe you and I are composed of the same elements. Maybe you and God are composed of the same elements. And maybe, just maybe . you and hip-hop are composed of the same elements. Or as K-os might say:

In the beginning the light shined so bright
Within the city of my mind-scaped night
Listening, glistening the moon
Reflecting the sun, making me one with the music

So if we are indeed “one with the music” and one with the universe, that would mean we have existed all along . throughout the entire 20 billion year history of the Big Bang; obviously not as conscious human beings, but as matter nonetheless. Perhaps we are without beginning and without end . perhaps time is unreal. Or as K-os might say:

Life is a mystery
This could be the end of all history
But wait, the sun rise in the east
And the world still spins 360 degrees
On its axis
This intergalactic practice of rhyming
Proves there’s no beginning or ending of timing

A Reason for Being
If this is the case, I would think that some catalyst would be necessary; some reason for our transfer into consciousness or our ability to remain conscious. For without our consciousness, we would just be part of the hydrogen and helium-composed matter that is the make-up of our universe. And maybe, just maybe . that consciousness is only realized through things we consider real or tangible: things like love, or money, or even hip-hop. Or as K-os might say:

We fell from sky and universe
When we fell in love with the sound
Of the birds and all the ocean lights
And the gravity pulling us down

I don’t know, man … but I do know that people use all kinds of things to actualize their existence. Some people have God. Some people have money. Some people have their jobs, or their families, or their hobbies. Shit, some people even have drugs. What’s so wrong with having hip-hop? Maybe it’s our love for hip-hop that keeps us going, that keeps us conscious, that keeps us alive. Thank about it. Peace.

Related:
This is one of the few albums to receive a perfect 5 star rating this year. If you like it, you should check out some of 2006′s classic releases, including Lupe Fiasco “Food & Liquor”, Jedi Mind Tricks “Servants in Heaven, Kings in Hell”, and KRS-One “Life”.