Yes, Why Lawd? is good. But that's not why I'm here. If the Paak stuff is the only of Knxwledge you're familiar with, please allow me to guide you a bit deeper. I first came into contact with the man behind the beats through the expanded universe of Action Bronson. In Traveling the Stars (where Bronson and Co hot box a soundstage with episodes of Ancient Aliens playing behind them on a giant green screen), Knxwledge outsmokes everyone and stays completely silent, radiating peace. I thought him a boulder in a Zen garden, sand raked around him, motionless on the material plane, and yet certainly contributing to the overall beauty of the tableau.
But when it comes to the musical world, maybe the more accurate garden-based metaphor would be something like a garden hermit. Because when you look close, Knxwledge is very clearly tapped into something. He’s an unclogged, free-flowing conduit. He is the stoner who, rather than fuzz himself out from lucid reality, has instead dropped himself into some mystic current of divine will.
The vast output of this hermetic work appears on Bandcamp–less so on streaming–but most gloriously on Youtube. I have long been a visitor to the Knx Youtube channel. Sometimes he gifts us a few tracks in a week. Sometimes he goes months in between. But at this point, he’s posted a couple hundred little videos over the past five years. Enough to get lost in and discover something new every time. It serves as something of a chillout room for the vibeyest club on the internet. It’s ripe to be used as a playlist for the background of your life.
I’ll throw it (sound on or off) on the Youtube-enabled smart TV at the function to delight and mesmerize. I’ll throw it on my laptop late at night when I want to light up a bowl or some incense. The visual world is a collage of looped snippets from anime, off-brand sport and dancing games, soul train episodes, and many other Garry’s-Mod-looking internet scraps of unknown origin–all littered with flecks of graffiti and a hard-to-miss ubiquity of Kermit the Frog.
The titles read like the kind of DAW file names you’d fling out if you made a dozen beats a day. The music? It’s dusty and deep. Trippy and soulful. Playful and weird. Lo-fi beats to breathe/vibe to. It’s the main menu music from that favorite, half-remembered video game from the 90s.
Some of Knxwledge’s best work, though, are the beats he furnishes around freestyles. These get the most views. He has a specific obsession with comeup era Meek Mill (his Bandcamp page hosts six whole albums of Meek raps over fresh beats). This one here is rightfully his most popular creation, sitting now at 11 million views (of which I myself have contributed many), towering above the subconscious iceberg base that we’ve been talking about:
Here’s the thing about this remix–and the others in this genre that Knxwledge has created. You can find the original freestyle. It’s fine; it’s good; but you might not dawdle. Not unless you had noticed the story behind it. Not unless you had grown able to hear the hunger and spirit behind this early era of Meek Mill, when he channeled his strength earned from trauma, his diehard posse of supporters (who you can hear finishing his bars for him) into a single-pointed desire to amplify his voice to the masses. So Knxwledge crafted him a production filled with that gentle desperation and glory. Simple guitar strums and splashy drums give Meek a golden pool to swim around in, his head bobbing among the crowd. Tom fills punctuate his punchlines and then the beat gives out, giving space for Meek to land his point.
It reminds me of having a close friend, one that you know so inside and out that you desperately want everyone to see their soul, even as others end up completely not understanding them the way you do. How do you show the world what you find beautiful?
One way is to harmonize with it. And so the image of Knxwledge as a cloistered hermit isn’t quite the full story. Remember that internet-age hermits can actually have their eyes and ears to the world, even when they don't appear to. And he’s often lending his talents to emphasize these moments of beauty that he finds. Like the rare architect in touch with nature enough to build something which takes a step back and underscores some naturally occurring perfection. Beyond Meek, he lifts from the shadows some truly marvelous moments of underground street rap. I’ll leave you with this one, because it’s my favorite. Two minutes where a random Bronx street spitter who has never put his voice to record genuinely seems like the greatest rapper of all time, all because for that moment he was, and Knxwledge is able to show you that truth:
Thanks for reading!
