J. Kosmos - Artist Feature

From London, 20-year-old Joel Kanthakumar is a rapper who is best known as his stage name J. Kosmos. I interviewed the up and coming artist and found out what his influences are, how he began his music career and got a glimpse of what he has planned for the future.

Kosmos comes from a family that loves music, and has been surrounded by music all his life, ever since he was a kid growing up in the 90’s. The 90’s was dominated by hip-hop and R&B, and it was a time where ‘gangster rap’ was at its peak. Artists such as Dr. Dre, Biggie and Tupac flourished in this era and all had platinum albums. It was also a time where Michael Jackson was at the forefront of the entertainment side of the music industry. Kosmos revealed that these artists had a massive influence on him, from a variety of different aspects of his life.

He said: “Growing up my mum would always play Marvin Gaye, Michael Jackson, real soulful tunes. My cousins would always bump OutKast, Biggie, I guess from them growing up in the early 90’s and me growing up in the late 90’s, that 90’s hip hop wave was always a massive influence on me.”

According to a study by Forbes magazine, the genre of hip-hop recently overtook rock as the most consumed music genre on streaming services. This would lead anyone to believe that trying to make a name for yourself in the music industry, especially the hip-hop genre, given the circumstances - would be extremely difficult. Yet Kosmos believes in himself, he said: “I know how hard it can be to breakthrough, but I’m ambitious, and I just love music. I feel like as long as the love of music is there I’m always going to create music, and I want to make a name for myself.”

Having influences in music such as Biggie, Marvin Gaye and OutKast is an extremely unique blend of artists. Biggie was known for the lyrics that felt so real, that reflected his personal life and connected you to the music. OutKast were known for their revolutionary soulful sound, that altered how many hip hop artists created songs.

When you listen to Kosmos’ music, Biggies’ influence of personal and meaningful lyrics is portrayed in his songs. OutKast’s hip-hop changing soulful sound from Andre 3000 and Big Boi can be heard in his tunes too, Kosmos’ sound is one that isn’t often heard in today’s music scene, and one that cannot be replicated by others. He has all the making of what’s needed in a music artist, he can sing, he can rap, and he can switch up his flow.

Kosmos is a self-proclaimed massive fan of hip-hop himself because of his upbringing and the influence it has had on him since he was a child, but he doesn’t believe that all the music he makes can be labelled as hip-hop.

Kosmos is an artist that doesn’t like to categorise his music into a certain genre. He said: “I would say the music I make is more than just one genre. I’ve always been a massive fan of music in general and it’s [his music] just where all my influences come from like MJ and Biggie so I just try to fuse them together and mix singing with spoken words. I just try and put my own twist on it.”

Kosmos told me he began his music career by making beats because of his love for music, and he thought of it as a hobby, something to pass the time when he’s not busy. Many music artists over the years, some legendary ones such as Kanye West and Pharrell, and some new artists on the scene such as NAV have begun their music career by making beats and then wanting to jump on their own beats themselves and make records. Kosmos is no different, he revealed that a group of his friends began to use his beats for their music group named The Soulciety Collective.

Kosmos said: “At first I was just playing around with the software on my laptop, but then I slowly started to figure it out and one day one of my boys started freestyling to one of the beats I made, and it just kicked off from there…”

After seeing how much his friends enjoyed making music together, he decided he was going to do more, he wanted to start making tunes himself.

Kosmos began by uploading his tunes to SoundCloud under his artist name ‘J. Kosmos’, his track ‘Summer Time’ that he released on the streaming service gathered over 1,000 listens. ‘Summer Time’ is an upbeat, funky tune that was released in the summer time of 2017. Kosmos raps on the track about being on a good vibe, and when I asked him about what the process was like behind the track, he told me: “I was just in a good place when I wrote that song, that was the first one of my tracks that I didn’t produce myself and when I heard the beat, it just spoke to me. It came to me at the perfect time really.”

Although he has used SoundCloud to upload his tracks for anyone to listen to, Kosmos uses Spotify consistently, it’s his main streaming service that he uses to listen to tracks. After using SoundCloud to upload tracks, he recently decided it was time to put a song onto Spotify, which he believes is a massive achievement for himself.

He said: “SoundCloud’s cool in the fact that everyone’s just putting music on there and it’s great that we have a platform to put our music on, but putting it up on Spotify was like man, we are taking it to that next level and seeing it on Spotify was like okay, now we can do this... we can put tracks up on there and we can get a following and really do this music thing properly.”

For a relatively unknown artist, the early success inspired Kosmos to make more and more music. It also drove him to put on an event for fans of himself and The Soulciety Collective at the Roper Hall in Preston, during April of 2017.

Kosmos said: “At first I was scared, because I’m thinking ‘What if no-one turns up, you know?’ But nah, people came out, and it was insane, performing in front of people, fans that came to see and listen to your music, it was just unbelievable. Doing it with the whole squad as well, The [Soulciety] Collective, it was great. Having some people come out that don’t even know the music and have 300 people show up and just enjoy themselves and have a good night, they inspired us all to do more shows, create more music. We didn’t expect it to be as good as it was. It ended up getting shut down an hour early, but it was sick. Hopefully next time we can use a bigger venue and even more people will come.”

Another show for The Collective and Kosmos could soon be on the cards, Kosmos revealed to me that the wheels are in motion, and they are currently planning and ironing out all the minor details.

He said: “Right now we are working on a group Collective EP, which should be like 5 or 6 tracks and we are hoping to do a show off the back of that.”