K-OS Reveals The Path To Atlantis

Canada's great hip-hop hope, K-OS, is a study in contrast. At the outset, you have Kheaven Brereton, an extremely thoughtful and well-spoken ambassador to Canada's criminally slept on hip-hop scene. At the other end of the spectrum is K-OS, whose party-boy image is slowly overtaking the admired, politically conscious lyricist.

Even at his most reserved, the latter is easy to observe. During his interview with ChartAttack in late September, K-OS pulled a bottle of white wine from his knapsack and drank for the rest of the afternoon. He's well aware that his behaviour is attracting attention, and he couldn't seemingly care less.Perhaps that's why his third studio record, Atlantis — Hymns For Disco, is his most revealing to date. Shedding the pretense of politics, the new LP is an anthology for life before the club, at the club and after the club.

"I was dating a girl who would work in a club and I would sit there," K-OS recalls. "I was so bored I just watched people.

"And I'm like, wow, this is kind of interesting how much people sweat out their troubles through the dance floor. It was inspiring. And the people who I was watching weren't people I would hang out with, but they looked like they were having so much fun, and I was like, 'I want to make music like that, the kind that makes people dance.'

"And lo and behold, I'd be in a club in the corner, hiding, watching people dance to my song, and I'd be like, 'That's cool.' Sometimes I'd do that on a Friday night, go out and slip into somewhere and wait for them to play my song and watch it. I don't feel weird about that. I think it's pretty human to want to have that experience.

"So I was liking that, but then my life started to become a result of that. I started to play into that. I'd go out a lot and hang out a lot. It was fun until the next morning, or until, like, you got a call a week later and you said something you shouldn't have. It's kind of weird that there are all these songs that get you hyped at the club, but there aren't any songs that make you reflect about your life, a life like that, if you're continuously going to the club.

"And that's what 'Sunday Morning' is — that's the first song I made to make a new record. I made that song and I cried because it was my soul saying, 'Dude, you need to chill out. You went through this phase where you were going out and thought everything was superficial, but then you turned into that guy.'"

Despite turning into that guy, K-OS didn't shy away from the scene. Instead, he embraced it. If you go out on any given night in Toronto, there's almost a 50-50 chance that you'll see the MC at a bar, coming from a bar or going to another one.

And while "Sunday Morning" might have been the first track on the record influenced by the person K-OS became, it wasn't the last.

"We hate the things that we want to become or that we might become," he explains. "And so it's not about hating that person, but it's about using that information to spread a new gospel.

"And so I took all that information from how I lived for the past few years, and this record isn't about making songs for the discos, but they're hymns. They're songs that can accompany you to the club or that you might want to listen to outside of that.

"It's just like, I do believe all songs are hymns. People say, 'That's a hit.' It's really a hymn. A hit is a song that people have liked for years, and when someone does it, everyone recognizes it as a hit. That's why you can't ever know who's going to make a hit. Because a hymn is something that comes out of pure emotion, not of calculations. That's why I said 'Hymn For Disco,' because I don't know if there are any hits on this record, but I definitely think there are hymns, things that my children could listen to and say, 'I'm proud of that. Maybe I could sing it in my own way now.'"

While the title, Atlantis, conjures imagery related to the doomed underwater kingdom, the record itself is grounded in reality. It's probably best not to look too much into the title of the disc, since it basically found itself on the album through a string of unrelated literature and media that K-OS observed over the last decade.

"Around '98 and '97, I started reading a lot of new age metaphysical books, and a lot of them always went back to Atlantis and told a story of this place that evolved so far," he says. "Something happened to technology and, because of this technology, they got too advanced in the technology and they forgot how to be human.

"Their technology was so advanced that they started messing with nature. And so then the flood came and wiped them all out. Then New Orleans happened."I would listen to Bo Diddley, Bob Dylan, and everything started hitting me. And then finally I went back and read the story of Noah, who was, like, a drunk in his town and started telling everyone the flood was gonna come and no one would give him the time of day because he was a drunk. And I was drinking a lot at the time. It's not like I missed knowing something that was so deep, but, no one understands what you're thinking because you were drunk and you weren't making sense.

"Then I was in some hotel room on tour. The Man From Atlantis came on with Patrick Duffy. It was like this cheesy '70s TV show where he'd be swimming under water and I was like, 'That's it: Atlantis.'

"K-OS is Chart's cover artist for November. You can hear him spread his unique gospel on tour with Magneta Lane at these clubs:
Nov. 10 Edmonton. AB @ Starlite Room
Nov. 11 Banff, AB @ Wild Bill's
Nov. 12 Calgary, AB @ MacEwan Hall
Nov. 15-16 Vancouver, BC @ Commodore Ballroom
Nov. 17 Victoria, BC @ Sugar