K'Naan: C/D S/D

It's a very potent beer.

"potent beer"

i lol'd

Ok, I listened to dude finally.

and?

The half of the album I listened to is pretty good!

I naturally want to lump him in with softest-serve ecleftic white-guilt critical picks like early Black Eyed Peas and K-Os and Arrested Development, because that's clearly the type of audience he's gonna get in America. But, a) it's really hard to do that since his shit is gritty as hell and about gun violence and how it's even shittier in Africa than in American/Canadian inner cities. And b) the half of the album I listened to is all upbeat and party-centric and not a bunch of hippie shit.

And besides, i'll fuck with a little Black Eyed Peas and K-Os and Arrested Development in small doses because the real problem with those groups isn't that they suck or anything, it's that there's a group of nerdlingers who go OMG HOW CAN YOU LISTEN TO JAY-Z WHEN WE HAVE THIS?! that create instant backlash from hip-hop heads and ruin it for everyone and make it embarrassing for ringtone cru type people to even approach stuff like that on a critical level beyond LOL PATCHOULI.

The album is way better than those covers let on, dude is clearly trying to make every song a hit, and I actually feel bad for sleeping so long. Sorry, K'Naan.

That's how I break it down to an extent.

=I can definitely dig that.

no idea where the "=" sign came from

"If Rap Gets Jealous" is awful tho.

In the Village Voice, still barely scratching the surface:
http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-02-25/music/the-shifting-republic-of-k-naan/all

Both albums have a bunch of stuff that just sounds silly to me, but I think the original version of "If Rap Gets Jealous" is great, in the kind of the genre-less way of "We Will Rock You" or "We Care a Lot" or even "Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth With Money in My Hand". Sadly, I think the Hammett-adorned remake is almost definitively charmless. But man, if that first version could be on a 45 with the new album's "Fatima" (half "Biko", and maybe a quarter "Luka") as the b-side, and I were 14 again, it'd be the great thing I ever heard for at least a month.

So, wait, how much of this new album incorporates The Dusty Foot Philosopher, or does it include totally unfamiliar/rerecorded material?

I've been bumping the old one in regular rotation for weeks and the new one is just n/l. The first half-dozen or so are straight, as the kids say, fire, and the back several take it home. Sure, if rap gets jealous is very production-y, not as organic as the better original, but it's still a great tune. And yeah, I love that dude doesn't care about rules and goes melodic without even wyclef's self-consciousness. Best thing I've heard in a while.

Loved Dusty Foot Philosopher. The cleaner production on the new one and the distillation/removal of the blatant African sonic influences was a bit jarring at first, but whatever Troubadour lacks in comparison to the first album, it makes up for in droves with creativity, sonic inventiveness and the pure-wtf-ness of the Kirk Hammett version of "If Rap Gets Jealous".

xxxxp Plus, k-os isn't that bad once he drops his self-important save-rap-from-gangsterism somewhere in the murk of Joyful Rebellion/Atlantis and just starts making straight up hip-hop/rock/pop/disco/whatever fusion tracks.

Lewking forrid to the new one - haven't heard it - but how can you do a C/D/S/D thread on an artist that just released his second album?

He's doing a free show from 6 to 7 Eastern time(and webcast live and archived) at the Kennedy Center Millennium Stage in DC

That's on Friday night

dude played hand drum at the show tonight. the guitar player was a dorky white dude. somali flags in the audience. awesome.

Has anyone else heard/seen the mixtape? It's called You Can't Buy This (and you can't--I got mine off a windowsill at a local CD shop), 8 songs, 33 minutes. The obvious favorite is "Kicked, Pushed," about racist police brutality in Amsterdam (and, duh, using Lupe Fiasco's beat).

forgot to mention, it was mixed by K-Salaam & Beatnick

I'm trying to find his Minneapolis CD (or was it a cassette?) What's Next? and will buy his CD with Youssou N'Dour and the original version of his first album when I have the dough. When I do, I should have nearly everything by him (there's a bootleg and demo out there), and can do my own completist search recommendations.

I should say, official boot: The Dusty Foot on the Road.

Any man who knows a thing knows he knows not a damn damn thing at all.

His 1 hour free show at the Kennedy Center last night on February 27 is video streaming on real player-

http://www.kennedy-center.org/programs/millennium/archive.html#

xgau

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101045881

At which point I learn "ABCs" has yet a newer mix, and no apostrophe.

Okay, I absolutely love Troubadour. It's not perfect, but this is everything certain critics seemed to promise from Wyclef over the years and he never delivered on.

More Xgau:

K'naan
"Troubadour"
(A&M/Octone)

What makes K'naan's hip-hop Somalian is less the authenticating stories he tells than the atmospheric samples he claims -- after a snatch of Marley ska, the borrowed stuff is all Buda Musique swing from up Addis Ababa way. But lest you think him a do-gooders' rehab project like Emmanuel Jal or Sierra Leone's Refugee All-Stars, be hereby informed that when this ambitious and optimistic fellow talks "song hook," he knows whereof he speaks -- just as he does when he rhymes in the English he learned as a teenager, though I hope he outgrows "Somalia"'s -ation rhymes. Chubb Rock and Mos Def cameos are about it for his hip-hop cred, but Damian Marley-Adam Levine-Kirk Hammett is a pretty good pass at pop cred. Not that they guarantee sales. But after what K'naan has been through, bless him for trying -- the ebullience he extracts from a life much tougher than North Americans can know is worthy of soukous, mbaqanga, the highlife of Ghana's most punishing inflationary spiral. Spiritually Afropop, rhythmically Ameripop -- instead of hip-hop, maybe we should call it rap. He likes the word fine himself.

Grade: A MINUS

http://music.msn.com/music/consumerguide/

Okay, so I just listened to his "Kick, Push" freestyle and my impression is that this dude can write lyrics, but he's just off-beat enough to where annoys me without becoming interesting.

"Wavin' Flag" entered Hot 100 this week at 99.

That's nice to see, hope it moves up. Its the track that I used to convince my wife how great he is.

I love the new album. I think from tracks #3 -> #12 are a pretty perfect run. I don't dig ABC's or 15 Minutes Away quite as much as the rest of the album.

Also, against my better judgement: Has anyone else noticed the Jewish lyrical references throughout the album? Not, as someone suggested, the ubiquitous Rastafarian-styled Old Testament references, but actual post-Biblical Jewish references (Bar Mitzvah, dancing the hora (not as sure about this one), L'Chaim... On "Bang, Bang," he rhymes: "A very Western toaster, / She ain’t nothing Kosher," tho that might just be for Adam Levine's benefit. I'm curious though where all these more-or-less Ashkenazi lines are coming from. (Maybe his lawyer? I remember him mentioning his lawyer with a very Jewish-sounding name on one of the tracks. Like Sam Grossman, or something.)

Can we agree on a definition of 'NPR Rap'?

Sike I should probably give this guy more time before I go there.

i think i prefer the debut, tbh--a couple of the new tracks ("Wavin Flag" and "Somalia" mainly) seemed a bit too corny for my taste after the first couple of listens. but, yeah, the album holds together throughout, and sounds great besides.

NPR Rap - Somalian born dude escapes war-torn country only to annoy ilx autogooners with lack of cred/flow/beats. news at 11:00.

NPR Rap - Hip-hop with crossover appeal?

I don't know that's necessarily a bad thing.

Dramatic life story results in good music, p. A4

heheh, too troo.

NPR Rap - Hip-hop with crossover appeal?

You mean like Plies?

I don't generally complain about Pitchfork reviews (and I won't here), but I think there's something very telling in today's review in terms of how people tend to deal with "foreign" music, and particularly with K'naan. In particular, the complaint seems to be that K'naan doesn't allow listeners to be tourists, and Joshua Love complains that "Still, I wish I left Troubadour feeling like I knew more about Somalia than I did going in, and I'm not entirely sure that's the case," as though K'naan's obligation is to teach his fans about Somalia, and not just that he's an artist who incidentally comes from Somalia.

Josh is a friend, so you don't have to accept this defense, but the review points out how K'naan's talent for conjuring Somali life in his other work led Josh to expect something similar here.

I don't see why expectations deferred, or subverted, are necessarily a critique.

Why not?

I take issue with "necessarily."

I guess I just feel uncomfortable with the formulation. K'naan is either being colonized as a Somalian (please give us a tour thru Somalia and teach us about your country) or as an artist (please fulfill my expectations: I want A, please deliver it), but I expect more from a music critic. At least a willingness to play with the album on its own terms. And I think the language suggests this when it says, "What's worse, someone decided this coming-out party needed a dose of star power..." as though K'naan is at the mercy of his handlers and would he be allowed to simply make his own album we'd have a wonderful native thing. But since he's been corrupted by "someone [who] decided" and this "star power," his Somalianism is being undermined.

And it's totally bizarre that he describes "Fatima" as a Slumdog-esque song when, as far as I can tell, there's no Indian-pop in the song. So he's noting a love story narrative in a war zone. But certainly Slumdog isn't the first (or most striking) example of one of those. But both India and Somalia are somewhat exotic places for a US listener.

good review; lousy closing line. that's how i'd rate that Pitchfork piece. i mean, c'mon, it's not like K'naan's obliged to school us poor, deprived westerners re: the horrors of living in Somalia (then or now). "a cheap holiday in other people's misery" anyone? why yes, i'll take two, thank you very much.

Yeah, that is a terrible last line. The rest of the review, though, was pretty great. I like some of the songs Mr. Love doesn't, and don't like some he does, but we're precisely agreed on the general nature of the album, and I thought he got the characterizations of each of the cameos he mentions spot-on.

At's OK; at his best K'naan's as good as anyone. Somehow I hope BIG SUCCESS eludes him for a while yet so he's got some genuine material left for the difficult third album and it's not all about the gold cadillac he gave to his third ex-wife in six months... but I don't see how it can - "Dreamer" sounds like the monster hit of Summer '09 to me.

Troubadour persisted through the summer. Saw him live twice a few months back and he and his band really have good chemistry. They let a lot of the numbers stretch out into longer jams. Not afraid to slow them down/switch them up/totally rewrite them/turn them into poetry slams live, as the crowd and his whim dictates. His self-proclaimed debt to Fela Kuti really shone through at moments in the best way possible. Also, the band was really tight.

Anyway, revived more to ask if any of y'all have heard his new mixtape series with J. Period, The Messengers. It's a three volume tribute to Fela, Bob Marley and Bob Dylan where he remixes a bunch of their stuff with new and old verses, contextualizes his influences and throws them all together into a mesmerizing soup.

http://jperiod.com/knaan/

Thanks for the heads up on the mixtape. That sounds potentially awesome.

(More than potentially! I'd been idly jamming them volume by volume but they just released the all-in-one thing and it's really something else. about 50/50 new/old verses from K'naan but it's really next level, and something that balances out my initial unease with the pristine & sanitized feel of Troubadour)

Better than that other recent mixtape? This album is not for sale or something?

You Can't Buy This wasn't designed AS a mixtape per se...more of an odds'n'sods collection

It had the original version of Troubadour's 'Somalia' that he decided was too depressing to put on the album, an MTV Live song he improvised w/ Nelly Furtado, his website-only Kicked, Pushed freestyle and some tracks that he featured on from other people's albums (Amadou + Mariam, Mos Def, M-1).

This is a coherent listen front-to-back, much more comparable to say....Rhymefest's Man in the Mirror or other mixtapes that are designed to be heard as albums and not as disparate collections of leaks or leftovers. So yes, better, but also very different.

dude is mad boring imo

well, recognizing that we don't like earnest/conscious/earthy/etc. these days because it's not as "authentic", he's certainly not gucci. maybe it's a live thing, but he works a crowd better than pretty much anyone i've seen this year. captivating.

actually, not just a live thing. great ear for a pop hook and a constant willingness to experiment. maybe that makes him npr-rap or HEY GUYS I'M WHITE-bait, but like...he has a strong voice and the tunes are good enough that i don't give a shit. ymmv.

wow. that was...defensive of me? i dunno. i don't think i'd want to hear a whole bunch of k'naan copycats. but he does what he does well enough that he makes me care, you know?

I don't think he's boring at all, he's v v entertaining even when not entirely original.

My artist of the year: http://www.citypages.com/2009-12-23/news/aby-wolf-k-naan-and-p-o-s-top-artists-of-the-year-09/5

And he was never heard from again.