Consider my core shaken
Let me tell you something first, when it comes to the arts, there is nothing in this blessed universe of ours that I love more than being shaken to core; in short I love being moved. I obsessively court excitement, searching for it even in places where I don't expect to find it. I am a blank slate waiting to be overwhelmed with the passions and emotions of others; I lie there expecting to thrown across the room. But as usual, such expectations are rarely satisfied. I am always surrounded by mediocrity. But lately I've felt that even the best of artists are inconsequential at best, and dishearteningly shallow at worst. I asked myself: where is the responsibility in art? When did music turn away from politics, or rather why did music stop caring about the collective and instead only aimed to express the individual?So when I listen to music these days, I receive snapshots of individuals floating in a void. I receive fragments of emotions completely disconnected from anything else, as if the artist exists in a vacuum.
Then I came across K'naan, a Somali rapper from Toronto. I received his album The Dustyfoot Philosophers yesterday, from an auntie who had returned from America. I didn't listen to it immediately, my experience of Somali rap music has not been very heartening. Usually Somali artists don't think about personal input in a project they so desperately want to model on current best-selling rappers. They are usually too busy emulating African-American rappers who approach issues from a perspective rooted in their culture and their history. I don't think they realise that Somalis have a very poignant and unique perspective too, and instead they build on the golden gangster image they are taught to worship. Never mind that the vast majority of American rappers are completely inconsequential and painfully shallow. Most rappers, whether it be Ja Rule, Dr. Dre or even Jay-Z, make songs with the depressingly cynical intention of making more money. You can tell more devotion is expended on the beats and the mix, rather than on the person behind the words.
The sad thing is, Somali artists - who are all enriched by a cultured seeped in poetry - feel they have nothing better to say than "gangsta fo' life".
That's why I didn't want to listen to K'naan. In my own way, I had judged him long before he had a chance to overwhelm me; long before I had even heard of him. But I will be the first to admit it: when it comes to art, there's nothing I love more than being proven wrong.
K'naan is not simply a very good Somali artist. He is simply a great artist universally. A man who speaks globally, a man who speaks truthfully about the things that really concern him and not the things he thinks he should be concerned about; it is such a man whose relevance cannot be bound to just one market or to one label. Everyone interested in universal and individual truths, will be interested in him.
I don't want anyone dismissing me as a thug, or some shit like that
He is so far removed from the materialism and machoism from today's rap scene. Where self-glorification could never allow the kind of subtle self-deprecation that K'naan brings forth in some of his lyrics.
Over the course of the album, K'naan consistently releases the kind of dynamic poetry that can cross bridges and alert the world to the experience of a man which reflects that of an entire people.
I'll tell you straightforward...I'm poor / I come from the most dangerous city in the universe / you're most likely to get shot at birth
A harrowing line, delivered with a casual tone. This is K'naan and he doesn't glorify poverty or violence. This is a line from the powerful anthem If rap gets jealous. This song confirm K'naan as the kind of artistic reporter who illustrates the individual eye-witness account of war, at times with distanced objectivity and at times with a shaken voice struggling to hold back the tears, as happens on the track Voices in my head.
K'naan sees himself as part of a culture and that's the context he sells himself with. And when you're part of a culture, suddenly the range of topics and methods to express oneself widens; diversity and vibrancy is the result. Consider this as an evidence of an artist driven by more than money or self-gratification:
K'Naan was invited to Geneva to perform a spoken word piece at the 2001 50th anniversary of the UN Commission for Refugee's. In front of some of the biggest suits in the world, K'Naan brought the house down with his politically charged poem, K'Naan explains, "I basically called out the UN for its failed relief mission in Somalia." The audience was so moved by the piece that they gave K'Naan a standing ovation and African superstar Youssou N'Dour who was also in attendance loved the performance so much that he invited K'Naan to Senegal to record with him.
With K'naan I am seriously excited on two levels. First I had the exhilirating experience of being emotionally assaulted by such raw feverish music. The mix, the beats, the vocals, the entire production was a relentless torrent of undiluted emotion. On a second level, I am seeing clearly - perhaps for the first time - the perspective that I was talking about earlier; the perspective that is so unique to the Somali people; the perspective that I have lost over the years, along with my identity given to me by my ancestors.
I was about 7 years old when the war happened in my country. And while I was growing up, the war was just the affair of adults. The teachers at school treated me with excessive sympathy when the subject of war came up, but the truth was that the war didn't really affect me. Even when I became an adult, in my mind the situation in Somalia always seemed to be the concern of the previous generation. It still didn't affect me. Every day I would hear 'so and so was killed' and 'your cousin on your father's side, thrice removed was murdered'. I was a little sad, but not honestly devestated, the lives that had been consumed in the war were ones that were unfamiliar to me.
But lately, I have noticed other subtle ways the war might have touched me. I felt an air of depression in our Somali community, strong with the unexpressed frustration that every solution has become ineffective to a problem that seems to be without end, without limits and without hope. And I have noticed, that in sharing in this subtle frustration, in my own way I have been affected all along.
When listening to K'naan music, he brings these problems home and with it, he expresses the frustration felt by all of us. I don't think he's trying to change the situation in Somalia, I think he's trying to get us to want change, to crave it with our souls, I think he wants to remind us of our anger and of our sorrows for those who didn't make it out of the warzones. I think he wants us to shake with anger and frustration until we explode. Until that which bound us to silent frustration, releases us to shouts of anger. I think in a way, his songs are a battle-cry. The battleground is Mogadishu, the prize is freedom.
So thank you K'naan, for giving me perspective.
masterfully reported by Xu Said @ 5:44 PM
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