Hometown: Whitby, Ontario
It’s been 10 years since k-os’ sophomore release, Joyful Rebellion, transformed Toronto’s most versatile MC/singer/guitarist/song-and-dance-man into a cross-generational, JUNO Awards-crashing phenomenon, thanks to a string of ubiquitous, genre-agnostic hit singles – the garage-gritty reggae of “Crucial,” the Thriller-worthy funk of “The Man I Used to Be,” the scat-jazz bounce of “Crabbuckit” – that took up permanent residency on pop, urban and alternative-rock radio playlists across Canada. But for the artist born Kheaven Brereton, that moment may as well have been 10,000 years ago, when you consider the dramatic album-to-album evolution he’s undergone since. If rap initially emerged in the late 1970s as a collage of disparate sources – pulling in street poetry, chopped-up classic-rock riffs, manually looped James Brown breaks, and primitive electronics – k-os has spent the past decade trying to explode that idea of hip-hop into infinite new possibilities, applying the same collagist approach with a different set of materials on each record. For a restlessly experimental artist like him, there are no such things as career milestones. There are only springboards for the next leap into the unknown. Can’t Fly Without Gravity – an affirmation that “the forces which pull you down are simply put there to inspire you to rise above them” – promises to be a more stripped-down, holistic effort than its highly conceptual predecessor, 2012’s double-LP opus Black on Blonde.