Excerpt from K'naans piece in the NY Times, find the whole thing here : NY Times article by K'naan
"So some songs became far more Top 40 friendly, but infinitely cheaper.
On my second album, I had sung about my mother’s having to leave my cousin behind in Somalia’s war — “How bitter when she had to choose who to take with her...” Now I was left, in “Is Anybody Out There?” — a very American song about the evils of drugs — with only “His name was Adam, when his mom had ’im.”
The first felt to me like a soul with a paintbrush; the other a body with no soul at all.
SO I had not made my Marley or my Dylan, or even my K’naan; I had made
an album in which a few genuine songs are all but drowned out by the
loud siren of ambition. Fatima had become Mary, and Mohamed, Adam.
I now suspect that packaging me as an idolized star to the pop market in
America cannot work; while one can dumb down his lyrics, what one
cannot do without being found out is hide his historical baggage. His
sense of self. His walk. I imagine the 15-year-old girls can understand
that. If not intellectually, perhaps spiritually.
I come with all the baggage of Somalia — of my grandfather’s poetry, of
pounding rhythms, of the war, of being an immigrant, of being an artist,
of needing to explain a few things. Even in the friendliest of
melodies, something in my voice stirs up a well of history — of dark
history, of loss’s victory."
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