If there is a better African rap album in English, I don’t know it. This Toronto-based Somali maestro burst on the scene a few years back with his inventive, provocative, kaleidoscopic debut, The Dusty Foot Philosopher. Subsequent touring around the world—including stints with Damien and Stephen Marley—have only sharpened K’Naan’s worldly perspective, and the results show in these 14 songs, many recorded at Tuff Gong Studios in Jamaica. You might say that on this album K’Naan mediates his African experience through the filters of Canada and the Caribbean, and so makes the street fights of Mogadishu’s “river of blood” (WarDiigley) accessible and relevant to American hip-hop fans like nothing has before. What that overlooks is the fact that in addition to his 13+ formative years in Mogadishu, K’Naan has also paid his dues on the mean streets of Harlem, Minneapolis, and DC’s Anacostia neighborhood. In terms of reaching African American listeners, no African singer has ever brought quite this mix of experience and skill to the table.
K’Naan’s biography runs through many of these songs, his hard scrabble childhood in a war zone (“T.I.A.,” “People Like Me”) his experience of down-and-out poverty (“15-Minutes Away” a brilliant deconstruction of the Western Union-as-lifeline experience), his earliest brush with love and heartbreak (“Fatima”), and the lessons he’s learned as an international rapper (“I Come Prepared”). K’Naan doesn’t shy from the anger and pain in his life, nor from graphic language, including multiple uses of the f-word and the n-word, staples of edgier American rap. Hardcore language earns Troubadour a Parental Advisory for explicit content. It also helps make the more tender moments on this album more plausible and affecting. K’Naan sanctifies the act of giving in “Take a Minute,” and in “Waving Flag,” he embraces the hopeful idea that even the most down-and-out among us can dream of a better life: “When I get older, I will be stronger. They’ll call me freedom, just like a waving flag.”
For all the shock and seriousness packed into K’Naan’s dense and often brilliant raps, there is plenty of wit and playfulness there as well. “Bang Bang” and “Fire in Freetown” deal with dangerous love, likening a woman’s allure to “a loaded shotgun” in the former, and to the unruliness and beauty of a failed African nation in the latter. “The Dreamer” upholds the right to party and “have fun” even in war zones and ghettos.
Troubadour is far more elaborately produced than Dusty Foot, which feels whimsical, experimental and at times almost home-made by comparison. Now there are big, unifying ideas, principle among them the notion of sampling 70s Ethiopian pop songs, which are to K’Naan what classic R&B is to Kanye West. Ethiopian samples weave in and out of many songs. They animate the distinctive grooves of “ABCs” and especially “America,” a song that also features K’Naan rapping and singing in his native tongue with encouragement from Mos Def and Chali 2na. The Tuff Gong connection leads naturally to some tasty reggae touches, a sample of Bob Marley’s “Simmer Down” in “T.I.A.,” a guest rap from Damian Marley on “I Come Prepared,” and a bouquet of reggae vocal flourishes on “Waving Flag.” K’Naan feels free to traverse genres at will. Adam Levine’s vocal gives “Bang Bang” the flavor of late 70s, disco-leaning soul, and the lush choral passages and heart-thump swells of “Fatima” would be at home in a mainstream pop song almost anywhere.
Troubadour also includes a heavy metal remake of a song from Dusty Foot, “If Rap Gets Jealous.” On the surface, K’Naan is standing up for a rapper’s right to rock out, underscoring the point with guitar ballistics from Kirk Hammett of Metallica. But this high-volume showdown makes a larger point to those who would seek to own or control K’Naan. With feet in so many words, K’Naan risks offending any number of audiences, and he knows it. What he’s really defending is his right to make art on his own terms, and by doing that so boldly, he is building a broad, diverse, new audience that is unique in the histories of both hip hop and world music.
If there is a better African rap album in English, I don’t know it. This Toronto-based Somali maestro burst on the scene a few years back with his inventive, provocative, kaleidoscopic debut, The Dusty Foot Philosopher. Subsequent touring around the world—including stints with Damien and Stephen Marley—have only sharpened K’Naan’s worldly perspective, and the results show in these 14 songs, many recorded at Tuff Gong Studios in Jamaica. You might say that on this album K’Naan mediates his African experience through the filters of Canada and the Caribbean, and so makes the street fights of Mogadishu’s “river of blood” (WarDiigley) accessible and relevant to American hip-hop fans like nothing has before. What that overlooks is the fact that in addition to his 13+ formative years in Mogadishu, K’Naan has also paid his dues on the mean streets of Harlem, Minneapolis, and DC’s Anacostia neighborhood. In terms of reaching African American listeners, no African singer has ever brought quite this mix of experience and skill to the table. 