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The Rise & Rise of The Dusty Foot Philosopher

The voice of the new generation urban African artist sat down with Liha Mohass to explain why he is so unique.
Liha Mohass
Having just finished a huge European & Australian tour, K’naan looks set to hit the big time in Europe.
There is all of a sudden a sense of…..quite possibly awe. Possibly panic. K’naan arrives at the hotel lobby his stylish hat cocked to one side of his curly Afro. His sheer fabulousness, it seems, makes everyone in this West London hotel lobby, hold their breath. K’naan has the ability to hold an audience in thrall and this is obviously not only on stage. Having just finished a huge European and Australian tour, K’naan looks set to hit the big time in Europe. Praised by many this multi talented rapper started his tour in London where he supported Damien Marley at the Brixton Academy. His tour took him further to France, Belgium and Australia. He came back to the UK to do his sold out, solo gig which was primarily devoted to his much acclaimed, recent album The Dusty Foot Philosopher, which won him two Canadian, urban music awards. The voice of the new generation urban African artist sat down with Sheeko team to explain why he is so unique. Today he is the man of the moment but he is quick to down-play his rising fame. “I have never been focused on the aftermath of what I do or what I create. If I had been, what I create could have been different. I’ve never really been the one to say look at my work this is what I do. I’ve really worked on the passion in my sound for years by myself writing and critiquing my work, creating something genuine and unique. What happens after that is left to its own device. It is cool that people are starting to take notice in different parts of the world.” At the age of nine, K’naan was doing what most kids do. Hanging around his neighbourhood street corner, Mcing for his friends, dropping Nas and Rakim verses and other great American MCs with an almost eerie attention to detail and pronunciation — even though he couldn’t speak English, dreaming of the day when he could posses the lyrical skills and the rhythm. K’naan was already writing poetry; so taking up hip-hop on his arrival in America was second nature. However, K’naan is not an American kid. He is African; and he wasn’t on the streets of New York and Los Angeles or Detroit. He was on the other side of the world, the dusty streets of Mogadishu Somalia. His story is more remarkable than most, involving a harrowing odyssey that would see him exiled from this war-torn country before living in New York’s Harlem district and eventually settling in Toronto. K’naan Warsame [his first name means ‘traveller’] could liken his ghetto credentials to those of 50 cent. He witnessed his three best friends shot when he was eleven. His older brother was incarcerated after blowing up a federal building. He managed to escape a firing squad thanks to his aunt Magol, who was a famous singer in East Africa. “Then I moved to North America and had an upbringing of all sorts. I’ve lived in the ghettos of America mostly. Got into lots of difficult times, left school and then left the social structure entirely. I started to teach myself and I read literally for eight months everyday about anything I wanted to learn and then travelled around the world. This made me a different person and now it’s that person that is trying to make music as honestly as possible.” K’naan names Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, Fela Kuti and Bob Marley as influences but it took listening to revolutionary rappers to help him perfect his art. Now there are lots of institutions getting in touch with him to use his music. “There is a professor in the University of Colombia who uses my songs to teach and this happens in Washington DC. There is also another programme called the 411 initiative that has been going around schools in Canada. They use my songs to teach. In fact, my poetry is a part of the curriculum in nineteen schools.” K’naan got the chance to perform at the United Nation (UN) anniversary in 2001, and he took the risk of citing the organisation’s poor administration during the Mogadishu conflict. “I feel I have to make a statement of how our community in general feels about the UN and what has happened to us with regards to conflict with the UN. I feel that they have failed us in a sense. What I did at the anniversary was to play a song within a song and a poem about what was wrong with the UN.”K’naan doesn’t understand why there is still conflict when the UN is there to resolve it. “Someone needs to remind them that if we can’t be happy about them being here 50 years later something is still wrong.” For the most part, K’naan’s music stays faithful to Africa, and he explains that his memories of Somalia were key in formulating his unique style. “It’s interesting because in the US, a lot more than this is happening with my music. In such a short time, they went from knowing about Somali people and Africans only through Black Hawk down to young kids in New York City wearing Mogadishu T-shirts because of what we are doing-so it’s fortunate. I try to focus on why we do what we do rather than what happens after we do it.” When K’naan raps on his Dusty Foot Philosopher album, he often pleads for Somalia. “Blues for the Horn” is a lament for what has become of his home. “What’s hardcore” lyrics are striking “I’m a split these verses because I feel annoyed/And I’m not going to quit until I feel the void/if I rhymed about home and got descriptive/I’d make 50 cent look like limp Bizkit.” As hip-hop passes the quarter century mark, it has evolved in ways no one could have imagined. It has gone from underground to mainstream, from black to multi-racial, from American to international. It has reached the very farthest corners of the world and planted its seeds in the souls of kids from every country. K’naan is a child of that generation, the first generation of true hip-hop children who have grown out of a very foreign soil. The Somali culture is not known to be very approving of the kind of work he does. Thus, several questions arise: How does he deal with this? He shrugs “I’ve kind of surpassed that era. That happens to you when you are adjusting your dreams and working on it or polishing it. I’ve been doing this for a long time so people have just left me alone to do it. They’ll say, ‘This is what that guy does. He makes music, that’s what he does.’ But I am also fortunate to have parents who are very close to me and what I do. My mother really supports what I do. To be honest, what matters is my mother’s opinion. She is the one who can have a say and can criticise my work. She doesn’t see my music as something out of the way or young. She sees it as a philosophical tool, something that is helpful.” His advice however is “I don’t think we were all meant to do the exact same thing. Keeping people in a cultural leash is unfortunate. It doesn’t help people move forward and I am not talking about things that are ethically against our value systems as a whole. I am talking about normal things. Whatever you do, especially if you are going to be the first one to do it, you are going to catch a little bit of a backlash because people are not going to completely accept it. It is very tough if the community is closed. I would say it’s really about your passion and whatever it is that you want to do rather than your society or your social upbringing. I love when people can take their own lead on things and really be community leaders. Everyone is saying ‘I want to own a restaurant, internet shops, and then two doors down my best friend opens another one’ This is not progress for the community. So if you have an idea of what you want to do just go for it.”
There is intelligence to K’naan’s musings, and it’s hard to find an ounce of insincerity in his thoughtful proverbs and revolutionary rhetoric. “I want to introduce our people’s struggle on a bigger platform — to show the dignity and pride of our people, to show our worth, not people who are seen to be at war all the time.” An Islamic scholar who I respect said ‘It takes builders, planners, architects to create a structure but it only takes a fool to tear it down’ that’s what I would like to say. If you have your doctors, your lawyers, your internet shop owners, your artists, your musicians, your people who want to govern and your people who are religious, there is room for all of them. This is what makes a society whole and complete and it takes a fool to tear all of that down. You need some constructive thought to have built it, so build more than you can destroy.” He plans more travelling to further his campaigns in other countries. But you get the feeling that when all is said and done, he would like to go back to Africa. “I have a few places that I love in Africa such as Lamu, Kenya. I am thinking of visiting Tanzania too. I also love Senegal so maybe I’ll have a couple of homes in Africa.”
Look out for K’naan album, “The Dusty Foot Philosopher”and check out: www.thedustyfoot.com for updated diaries