WHAT’S HARDCORE? [K'Naan Interview - Blues & Soul]

“Don’t pre-judge, I don’t want anyone dismissing me as another thug. I’m poor, a refugee, been in prison and survived the war. I come from the most dangerous city in the universe – you’re likely to get shot at birth.” These are lyrics from The Dusty Foot Philosopher (BMG), the album of a serene and hospitable 28-year-old artist from Somalia, called K’Naan. He’s friends with Mos Def, he features on the latest album by M1 from Dead Prez, and he supported Damian Marley on his recent tour. Should you ever delve into a dictionary for a definition of ‘profound’, phrases similar to those which flitted across my mind whilst interviewing this engaging individual should arise; ‘having or showing great knowledge or insight’, ‘demanding deep study or thought’, ‘intense’, ‘extending to a great depth’.

K’Naan left Somalia at the age of 14, during a fierce war which was three years in. He, his mother, his sister and his brother, took the very last commercial flight out of the country amid “full-blown civil war, the bloodiest it had been for years, at the height of the dictatorship which had fallen to rebel soldiers and so the whole county was in flames,” he explains. “Everything else from then was a vacation” – he lived in New York for a year, then Washington (in Southeast, an area commonly referred to as ‘Capital Murder’ for its daily fatalities – some vacation!), and then settled in Canada, where he has since spent the majority of his time. He elegantly wields the English language with such poetic flair that it is astonishing to think he could not understand a lick of English when he boarded that plane fourteen years ago.

With mere phonetic recognition, throughout his childhood K’Naan non-comprehendingly recited all the words to his favourite hip hop joints, since being introduced to hip hop with passion by way of Eric B and Rakim and early Nas. Yet he clarifies, “Hip hop is by no means my major influence in music, in any way”, and cites Fela Kuti, Bob Marley, Bob Dylan and Nina Simone as favourites. An abundance of wannabe-thugs has left K’Naan feeling rather weary of the uniform-like conformity of rappers these days. “I don’t like to have to be anything. It’s become a closed environment – you have to be a certain way, you have to dress or think, talk a certain way. That is in fact initially what hip hop was against. It was trying to promote unique individuality – and now it is a uniform,” he explains of the feelings behind album track ‘If Rap Gets Jealous’, a rock-tinged critique on the fraudulent imagery rife in modern hip hop.

Gangster for gangster’s sake is something K’Naan doesn’t care for, and he should know – he was born in Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital of continuous conflict, which he describes as “the most dangerous city in the universe.” It might well be. Mogadishu is so dangerous that Somalia’s 2004 presidential elections were held in Kenya rather than in the capital due to chaotic violence. Rappers who shun gangsta-rap are generally swept rapidly into the ‘conscious’ box. As thoughtful and intellectually provocative as K’Naan’s musical reflections are on the incredible fourteen years spent in his motherland, he is quick to eschew the ‘conscious’ label. He reasons, “What an elitist, ridiculous category that would be. I’ve never ever uttered the words ‘I am a conscious artist’, I would never do that. That is like saying ‘I am a morally superior human being who walks the planet to serve’ – what is that? I try to make honest music. If they use ‘conscious’ to mean ‘aware’ or something, then sure; I know what I’m doing. But ‘conscious’ in the sense that ‘I’m better than the other guys who do gangster music and now you can let your children listen to it’… Well, I say some hard things about my stories, so I don’t know what they mean.”

One such difficult story occurred on the Swedish leg of the Damian Marley tour this year, for which K’Naan and his band were the opening act. “I was just trying to collect my things from backstage and this really huge Aryan dude was like ‘You can’t go back’. I said ‘I have my pass – you just saw me get off stage, I just wanna get my things’, and he said ‘I don’t give a fuck who you are’. He looked around and shoved me. I’m a skinny dude, so I hit the back wall. My manager ran in and said ‘What HAPPENED?’ Sol, my manager, wasn’t trying to be confrontational either and he was like ‘Dude, alright, we’re just gonna get our things then..’ and tried to go around him – and the guy grabs him by the neck and throws him into a room and three guys run in from another room. I start to realise something is up so I run in to try and help. One punch into my belly, my neck, a guy is holding me against a wall. These guys are super-size people and they’re standing on my face. Sol gets jumped and he gets taken to jail for the night. I hate to feel like I have no power over my circumstance. They tried to put us through a dehumanisation process and it’s hard for me to continue to tour. Disempowerment is a thing I have memory of and I don’t like, so that was a return of that feeling.” Unbelievably, K’Naan had a cameraman following them around to record an MTV diary, so they caught the footage on tape. The result: a music video called ‘Kicked, Pushed’ (using Lupe Fiasco’s ‘Kick, Push’ instrumental) featuring actual footage, viewable at www.myspace.com/knaanmusic.

To get a truer sense of the movingly musical, philosophical, poetic spirit I can merely scrape the surface in explaining, visit K’Naan’s website: www.thedustyfoot.com. K’Naan’s music and demeanour are absolute evidence of a notion he expressed at the end of our interview: “Struggle is a thing that causes an enormous amount of dignity in your life and beauty.”

K’Naan’s The Dusty Foot Philosopher is available now on BMG.

- Marsha Gosho Oakes (Published in Blues & Soul Magazine, 2007)

Photograph by Tamar Nussbacher.

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