What's Up?
During a five year run with The Black Eyed Peas, touring, producing and writing with everyone from Mos Def to Tupac, I was constantly asking myself What's NEXT? After my departure in 2000, I began spiritual work that challenged many ideologies around my race and religion. I became coined as a modern day Bush-Woman by fellow artists whose health I helped sustain on the road. I took notes while my grandmother was making salves and remedies from things that were in her kitchen. She had healing hands and a strong respect for nature. This kept me sane and connected to my roots during the most stressful episodes in my life.
As a mom in a climate thriving on over indulgence, it's essential for me to keep my life as simple and organic as possible. I harnessed the God given gifts that gave me creative license on the stage and put that energy into products, inspired by my son and accessible to all. Today, NOK marks the metamorphosis of what happenes when mixing ingredients replaces mixing records. I'm still nice on the mic though.
What's NEXT for you?
Kim
Life & Work
Bio:
Kim is a singer, actress, DJ and entrepreneur who came into the broad public eye via her participation in the Black Eyed Peas at the beginning of their, and her, career.
Quotes, Notes & Etc.
"I'm not trying to re-invent the wheel, I'm just trying to do right by the people who've inspired me like Sade, Nina Simone, Bill Withers and Steely Dan... I can deal with label rejection."
- Kim Hill interviewed by Gail Mitchell
I hope the first singer [Hill] makes it. The song had a very ethereal sound to it."
- Dionne Warwick
"This spring Kim Hill (who you may remember from the golden era of the Black Eyed Peas) is set to star in In The Morning, an indie feature. Ms. Hill plays one of the many protagonists, all young black New Yorkers working to find serenity and satisfaction in their romantic lives."
- Scott Heins
"Hill‘s Surrender to Her Sunflower is a testament to her marvelous vocal and songwriting talent."
- Derrick Mathis
"Kim Hill was first introduced to the music world as the girl in the Black Eyed Peas. On their 1998 debut LP, Behind the Front, that’s her voice lacing the beats with honeyed estrogen, helping stake territory worlds apart from the gangsta and bling that had come to define rap in the mainstream. Her sexy-but-not-nekkid vibe helped make inroads for the Peas, those torchbearers of breaking, dancing and laughing, those sons of Pharcyde. Along with her boys Will.I.Am, Apl.De.Ap and Taboo, she brought a sense of playfulness and open-ended possibilities to the table, broadening shrunken gender dynamics so that male-female communion wasn’t so mercenary, so bleakly combative. The foursome were a throwback to old-school pioneers Funky 4 +1, reminding you that the hip-hop guy/girl relationship could actually be warm, familial."
- Ernest Hardy
"Not one to bite her tongue (like, ever), Kim Hill softens her words with a sweet tone of voice and hyper-annunciated phrases. Referring to a song called “Disney” where she sings, No more auctions on the cinderblocks/ Now that Disney has stock in hip-hop, Hill says, “I’d write songs and my band would go, ‘Now we’re actually going to perform it in front of people?’ and I’d be like Yeah, and y’all are gonna wear Mickey Mouse ears.”
- Lindsey Caldwell
"The Real Hip Hop may not be as volatile as Ice Cube's No Vaseline or 2Pac's Hit 'Em Up... but Hill's fluid vocals and lacerating lyrics make it memorably acidic nonetheless."
- Craig D. Lindsey
“Because, yes, the character Harper (played by Kim Hill) is in an evening gown going to brunch, because [Hill] would actually do that.”
- Neferite Nguvu
"Hill’s entrée onto the national music scene at that time can be attributed to a winning combination of honey-laced vocals, skillful lyricism, coupled with the sort of campy showmanship that was a perfect complement to “The Peas’s” soulful, yet playful, appeal."
- Zawadi C Morris
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).