'You should be changing every 4 or 5 years': k-os reflects on his past, present and future selves

More than 20 years into his long, illustrious career, k-os is still growing and changing, as a person and as an artist. The rapper, who got his start in the '90s, is gearing up for the release of a new album (out next August), which he reveals to CBC Music is executive produced and funded by Drake, and he's also teaming up with Bob Rock for his brand new single, "I Would Never." 

Ahead of the single's release, k-os sat down with The Block's Angeline Tetteh-Wayoe to discuss his first-ever rap track, taking risks on his 2006 album Atlantis: Hymns for Disco (which celebrates its 17th anniversary this year), and why it's important to keep evolving as an artist.

So "Musical Essence" is on a compilation album called It's All Good: Zulu Nation Nonstop Mix. Rascalz are on it, Citizen Kane is on it… How did you end up on that compilation?

Honestly, I can say that I don't really remember. What I do remember was that my dad was like, "You're not doing music anymore. You're not stealing my records. You're not sampling anymore." I went to Ottawa University, and he paid for it, and he took all my musical equipment away. The first night I was there, I went out in Ottawa to some party in the Valley, and some Jamaican dudes were like, "Yo, college boy, you rock?" And I was like, yeah, and he said, "Come to the studio." And we did like, five songs, and that was one of the songs. I came back home, I played it for my boy, and he said, "I just got a VideoFact." I go, "What's that?" He's like, "You just hand in your song and they give you money." "Free?" So he got the VideoFact, and I got it; debated putting that song out because it was a rap song. The people in my hood and my friends knew me as a singer at the time… but it was the first track I ever rapped on. [...] You couldn't really make the crossover from singer to rapper, but you could go from rapper to singer. 

There were very defined lines between an R&B singer and a rapper. That's why it took a long time, and it took people like Missy Elliott, Mos Def and obviously Lauryn Hill to make it OK to sing and rap. But when I did it, it was '92 and I was from Toronto. So people in Flemingdon Park weren't pleased! They were like, "Who's this guy from Whitby, Ont. singing and rapping?" 

It's interesting because it almost feels like you were just caught up in this wave, and you're just like, "I'm just gonna ride this out," and not fight it. "You want me to rap? I'm going to rap." And then because you didn't fight it in that moment, that led to the next thing and the next thing, and then all of a sudden, you're an international superstar.

I agree with you. And I will say this: when Drake comes up, it's like, here's a guy that does all those things, but I don't think he took any of it too seriously. It seems that his thing is, "I'm going to do all these things and have fun with it." And when you do that, that energy is different. And I realized that's probably my association to Black music and hip-hop and rap was always like, let's see what fun I can have. How can I mix this up? It was never like, "I'm a serious rapper" or "I'm a serious singer," because I never wanted to be that person. 

It's kind of like what the ethos of entertainment is: the guy that you're watching should be having fun. It shouldn't be someone who's so seriously committed to this rapping that he might kill you if you don't follow the rap rules, you know? Which is okay, too. We need Public Enemy; our culture needs those gatekeepers to make sure that the music stays intact, but I was never one of those people. I was always a person who was kind of like a musical opportunist.

So before the whole rapping thing even happened, you were a singer. What was your relationship with hip-hop?Were you listening to hip-hop? Was it your main go-to? Was it your first love? Or was there something else going on? 

Hip-hop was always a goal. I would try to rap, and everyone would shut me down. The rap dudes would be like, "Shut up, you're a singer." And then this one dude named Nigel Williams, he was like, "You're pretty good, don't listen to them. That's why they're telling you not to do it, but just keep rapping." So I kept freestyling and gradually the dudes were like, "Alright, you can hang out in the cypher," because I had a couple of good punchlines.

I love hip-hop way more than singing. I always thought singing was like, if you're not Whitney Houston, just give up. If you can't sing like her, what are you trying to do, really? So, for me, the instant I realized that you could rap the word "fallopian tube," and say "Ethiopian dude" right after, I was like, this is way more interesting because you can't sing the word "fallopian tube." If you do that, people look at you really strange. It opened things up for me. The whole language, the lexicon, the vocabulary of rap [gave me] more possibilities. It's almost like rapping is a bus and singing is a TTC train that's stuck to the tracks, that kind of just goes this way all the time. So it was always hip-hop from day one, but I really wanted to be good at it, I didn't want to just do it. The whole thing with hip-hop is that you can always get better; it's a skill thing. With singing, it's like, that's your voice and that's it. But rap, you can develop and turn into a beast. 

So "Musical Essence" leads to Exit. Exit leads to Joyful Rebellion, and then Atlantis: Hymns for Disco. You had said that your family thinks that [Atlantis] is your favourite record.

Joyful Rebellion, that's the record most people would say introduced them to me and probably the one that they still have in their collection. Atlantis was sort of like a rebellion from Joyful Rebellion. I remember reading articles, which you're not supposed to do about yourself, but they were like, "conscious rapper" and "he has a message," and I was just so over this conscious rapper thing. What am I going to do? And then I just shifted, I just tried to live a life that was different than that, and it led me to hanging out with Sam Roberts and Broken Social Scene and all the indie-rockers — all these people reminded me of people from my high school years. And then I started making a record that was totally outside of like, having to have a message, or having to activate some kind of consciousness. I did that already, I don't want to make that a gimmick. I went to America; I got disillusioned. I met a lot of people who are in this conscious state of hip-hop, and they were also rock stars. They're conscious, they're spiritual, but their glasses are amazing! And I was like, OK, I'm going to do my rock star thing.

They don't really tell you about the rock star stuff, and I couldn't get that from anywhere urban in Canada because everybody was so [into] underground hip-hop and against that. So I started leaning toward the Sam Roberts guys and all the guys with the cool clothes. I can sort of take from this and add my own thing, and that's why I think Atlantis is my favourite record, because it's a guy who still loves that underground hip-hop music, but wants to integrate something that was never integrated into it before.

I love how you're just going to take it, whatever it is, and then mould it into what you need it to be to creatively get you where you need to go.

That's exactly what a lot of other people have been doing to Black music for hundreds of years. They see it, they find out what they can from it, and then they mould it. But for some reason, we as a people don't do that with any music outside of our own. I hate making sweeping statements, but it's very difficult to talk to another Black man or woman about Neil Young. They're just not interested, and that's so cool. I think it's the coolest thing. But if I tell my brother I'm going to a Coldplay concert, he starts to laugh. I think there's something funny about that, but I also think that you're missing out because there are things in there that, if you're a musician, you can harvest and put into your own thing.

But, I think to answer your question about feeling safe in those spaces, I'm going to go on record, for this interview to last however many years, and say that Canada has been very good to me. If I was born in America, I don't think I would have been allowed to get away with the genre-busting that I've done. And I think it's opened the door for the Weeknd and Drake — I think they can do whatever music they want to and no one would think it's weird. 

You said you were sick of being called a conscious rapper. Was it that label in particular or was it being labelled in general?

It wasn't just [being called] a conscious rapper, it was having a persona that I had to live up to, or stay in, which I think is death as an artist because you're constantly trying to be a caricature of yourself, trying to keep up with an idea that is long gone. Things switch so quickly. The 18-year-olds become 25-year-olds; the 25-year-olds have children and next thing you know, they don't really listen to music as much. So if you're still out here trying to be someone to a 47-year-old person, who has a kid on one arm, one going to prom, and has to make ends meet, then you've lost the plot. So if you look at your brand like that, you should be changing every four or five years, doing something that completely scares you, that people completely wouldn't expect from you. 

Well, you're a chameleon — you're just open to the evolution of yourself. 

Yeah, I want to do this for a long time, and to do it for a long time, I can't get stuck to any version of me. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. To hear the full interview, listen to The Block on CBC Music.