For almost three years K.SO sat in his prison cell, plotting his future and thinking about his past.
How K.SO wound up at Cabrini is a long story that’s difficult to track. He’s reluctant to release all the details, starting with his age and name. “Just say I’m older than 25 but younger than 30.”
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As for his name, he says: “I’m K.SO; I gave it to myself because that’s who I am. It stands for knowledge, strength, and opportunity. I was 12 when I came up with it.”
Mostly he writes hip-hop songs (before he was jailed, he opened for such acts as Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam, MC Lyte, and EPMD); his work is autobiographic. “The Greens Is Deep,” his love song to Cabrini, begins with a lyrical litany of the shows and movies filmed there (“From Good Times to Candyman to Cooley High / Hoop Dreams, Heaven’s a Playground and Do or Die . . . “) and goes on to describe a community surrounded by predatory wealth:
While in prison he wrote a column called “Hip-Hop Review” for Voices. The newspaper was founded in 1993 by Peter Benkendorf, a north-side ad executive, and Henrietta Thompson, a Cabrini-Green resident. During its 18-month run, Voices featured articles by 70 or so different residents. There was a cooking column by Godfrey Bey called “Come and Get It!” as well as “Shout Out,” in which local teenagers posted notices such as “I wanna send a Shout Out to Kidak, Cole, Crybaby and Eastwood. Stay Up.”
“I almost got my ass kicked for writing that, but I believe in writing what I think,” says Williams. “People said, “If you think you’re better than us, why are you living in Cabrini?’ I live here for financial conditions; other than Cabrini it’s a cardboard box on lower Wacker Avenue.”
But he also will run stories, poems, and songs by residents that describe hard lives and dangerous times. There is, he says, a difference between telling it straight and glorifying violence. “It’s not negative if it’s factual,” says K.SO. “Something that’s negative is throwing a murder or violence into the light and glorifying it, which is what the media does all the time. Something that’s factual is being stated. Something negative would be the hard-core, B.S. rap that these teenyboppers think is the law of the land, which is polluting their minds. It’s the difference between a rapper who states a fact and a rapper who boasts about committing murder.
