k-os - Heaven Only Knows: youtube.com/watch?v=lPLQuRTk-oo
I would get up early most days and walk to school with headphones uphill up Regent St, I remember seeing someone cross-country skiing once and cursing them because the hill was killing me, the only refuge whatever I was listening to. Most days it was k-os’ Joyful Rebellion. I was hearing revolution in Canadian music. It was all keeping me alive and reading, writing, building my early understandings.
For a time k-os was my Elvis, the irony of saying such a thing. I had turned hip-hop off, had been turned onto Notorious BIG and Tupac when I was a kid by my brother Ryan, Bodycount and NWA, but couldn’t understand it all, white kid in New Brunswick. I saw all hip-hop as out of touch with my wants, environment. I saw all hip-hop as money, violence. And k-os made music without a gun, no money, speaking revolution and concepts, ideas, the universe, books, women, god and evil, insecurities, art, it spoke to my every sense. And it was hip-hop.
So hip-hop found me and opened a sense I had dulled. It became exciting, made sense. It wasn’t the style but the substance I wasn’t connected to and not a lack of substance but a different form.
And Fredericton was a difficult town, strange time, stayed inside most days and barely knew the city at all, went months without meeting anyone new, drank, no stoner but got high mid-day television, would hide in the library most nights wouldn’t see anyone I knew. And the walk to school was arduous, uphill, winter, just headphones moving my feet.
I live in Toronto and see k-os, pass him in the street, bless and walk past alone.
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