May. 05, 2010 - Issue #759: Life of Yann

Prevue

KO blazes away from drugs

Toronto rapper channels rough past into debut album

For an artist, having a rough childhood almost comes with the territory, but even by those standards, Toronto acoustic-rapper Ko Kapches, stage name KO, has had a rough life. On the streets and doing drugs when he was only a teenager, at the tender age of 22 he's already been through rehab and found a path on the straight and narrow (or, at least the straighter and narrower).
And while no one would wish that kind of youth on somebody, KO has at least managed to turn his tough experiences into something productive, specifically his debut album Let's Blaze. Filled with stories quite literally from the street, it's as much a document, Kapches explains, as a way of putting his past to rest.
"This one, it's my first one, so it's kind of all about just getting all that stuff out," Kapches says over the phone from Niagara Falls, where he's enjoying a brief pre-tour chill-out. "But it's kind of a greener pastures thing, too: I don't want to be back there, but now that I've moved on and made a better life for myself, I'm able to kind of look at what it was and talk about it."

KO's document of that life is fairly unsparing, detailing lives torn apart by drugs, though never losing kind of a Everlast-y, white soul/urban folk vibe. If he seems like someone who is able to remain remarkably zen about his tumultuous past, though, it might be at least partially due to one substance he hasn't given up from his younger days: as you might have guessed from the album title, Kapches is a committed pot smoker, and as someone who has experienced a lot of the harsher things that drugs have to offer, he's happy to sing the praises of something he considers an overwhelming positive in his life.
"I don't even consider weed in with hard drugs," he explains. "I've done just about everything except heroin. And nothing makes me feel like weed. It just makes the world better. I make music better, I write better, I listen better, I—shit, I have sex better. I know some people don't think so, that's just my personal opinion, but for me it just makes everything better. I think a lot of the world's problems would go away if more people smoked." V

Fri, May 7 (9 pm)
KO
with Guests
Pawnshop, $12

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