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