AOK
w/ Sweatshop Union, Kyprios, Art of Fresh. August 9 (9pm). Velvet Underground (10030-102 St). Tickets: $14, available at the door or at Method, Soular, and Blackbyrd Myoozik.
When most rappers talk about hustling so they could afford to record an album, they usually mean selling drugs. But that’s not the case with full-time journalist and part-time rapper AOK (short for Assault Of Knowledge), aka Omar Mouallem.
In order to finance the printing of his debut If You Don’t Buy This CD The Terrorists Win, the local writer—who freelances for Vue Weekly and Toronto-based Exclaim!, among other publications—did something that no other rapper is likely to ever have done (or at least admit to doing): write a book about cats.
Mouallem’s Amazing Cats, a collection of heartwarming stories (according to the press release) about real cats was published earlier this month by Folklore Publishing. Among Mouallem’s subjects: Princess Kitty, who was dubbed “The Smartest Cat in the World” after being trained to play the piano and do “100 other incredible tricks”; and Oscar, a hospice cat who can predict patients’ deaths.
With the money he earned from the book, Mouallem was able to print and mail out his album to magazines and stores across Edmonton and beyond. And although Mouallem hesitates to call Amazing Cats simply a means to an end, he acknowledges the irony of an artist in such a hyper-masculine, testicle-grabbing genre writing about about furry felines.
“It was pretty funny, the whole thing,” Mouallem says. “Writing Amazing Cats was a very laid-back process, but I mean, I still took it seriously. I wanted to write the best book about amazing cats ever. Ultimately I knew the money I made from writing the book would help me finally put out an album, but I didn’t let that distract me.
“I’m still hustling, though,” he continues. “Except instead of pushing bricks or selling cake, I’m pushing words and selling books.”
But there almost wasn’t an album to put out in the first place. The songs on If You Don’t Buy This CD the Terrorists Win were recorded sporadically over the last three years as a way for the avid rap fan and critic to blow off steam, but it wasn’t until a few months ago that Mouallem decided to do anything with them. It was a fateful show at Velvet Underground that convinced him that there was a potential audience for an AOK album.
“I did a show on one of the Wildstyle Wednesdays that was a blast,” Mouallem recalls. “The guys that were running it at the time approached me to do a set there, and we got a really good reception during the show. People seemed to really enjoy what I was doing. We broke an attendance record that night and that’s when I realized an album might not be such a bad idea.”
Mouallem, who opens for Sweatshop Union next week, follows in the footsteps of other local journalists-turned-rappers like Rollie Pemberton, who these days pays his bills as Cadence Weapon, and Marlon Wilson, one-third of the local group Politic Live. Mouallem says this is a common career path for rap critics, although whether they’re as hard on their own music as they are on others’ is less certain.
“My biggest criticism of rap is usually originality,” he explains. “But I’m totally blinded when I’m making my own music—there’s no dissection of it on a critical level. I just do what feels right.”
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