K-OS Is Not Only An Amazing Artist But A Compassionate One Too.
I have been a fan of hip hop music as far back as I can remember. As a kid we would make our mix tapes off the radio and we could not wait for ‘The Jam Of The Week’ on MTV (yes they used to play MUSIC VIDEOS!!!). Watching hip hop come from this little baby in the 80’s into this cultural phenom in the 90’s was mind-blowing. I feel truly blessed that I grew up listening to the greats like Biggie, Tupac and Big L. Losing those three artists was a sever blow to the hip hop community, one which I feel the community never truly recovered from. Even though Tupac had his baggage he actually had a message unlike so much of the garbage on the radio today. When we lost these great rappers we also lost focus. Long gone were the days of Tribe Called Quest’s non violent, insightful and politically aware rhymes. They were now replaced with ‘Bling Bling’ ‘Ice’ ‘Flossing’ and all these other corny things that turned hip hop into a mockery of what it once was. Eventually by the early 2000’s, I just stopped listening and it broke my heart. It still makes me upset to turn on the radio and hear what my once beloved genre of music has become.
In 2005 I happened to catch a video on VH1 Soul or something random like that. This music video caught my ear because what I was hearing was REAL HIP HOP. I figured it must have been some old school jam that I missed growing up or maybe some new rapper that I missed since I am out of the loop. I caught the last 2 seconds of the video and got to see that the artist’s name is KO-S. I ran this name by everyone I knew who liked hip hop and everyone drew a blank. Now I was intrigued. So I run to F.Y.E. and they happen to have a copy of the cd that I saw on VH-1. Sweet. I then become obsessed with this man who calls himself K-OS, telling everyone about him, burning his cd for everyone who shows any ounce of interest in hip hop music. I was just being an overall ‘Stan’ about him.
I remember in 2005 when I got his cd ‘Joyful Rebellion’ I heard a line in one song about him no eating ‘fish, chicken or hamburger’. This was before I was vegetarian so I kind of wrote it off. Also knowing that a lot of rappers just say things for the sake of rhyming, I thought maybe this was the situation on Joyful Rebellion too. As I became a bigger fan and a vegetarian myself I got intrigued. Mr. Kevin Brereton is the man behind the K-OS, he hails from Toronto, Canada and he made the decision at 8 years old to become a vegetarian. 8 YEARS OLD??? Yup. He told his mom he no longer wanted to eat chicken and that was it. What started as an innocent decision he made as a child has turned into a lifelong passion for animals and all living creatures. Through all his years and phases of being vegetarian he says his strongest reason for being vegetarian now is the slaughter of animals. Not only a REAL artist but also a man with a heart of gold. Men like Kevin are hard to come by these days.
We had the pleasure of seeing KO-S in concert last winter (this was before I knew he was vegetarian) and I remember commenting to my boyfriend ‘I think Kevin is a vegetarian, I can tell by his body’. That was a nice thing to be right about 😉
http://www.peta2.com/outthere/o-kos.asp Interview With PETA
http://http://www.k-osmusic.com/ His Website
K-OS.
VeggieFitness 