I share Charles’ disappointment with K’naan’s show, but not because it betrayed hard-line hiphop protocol: no, I just thought the music was fair-to-middling.

K’naan undeniably has lyrical skills—especially for an ESL speaker—and a dramatic bio that surely could fill several notebooks with harrowing verses. The Mogadishu native’s a clever wordsmith with gripping subject matter, if not the most memorable or powerful delivery. Whatever his weaknesses, though, he had the sold-out crowd—heavily populated with East African immigrants—charmed from jump.

I’m not very familiar with K’naan’s work and wasn’t expecting to review this show, so I took no notes. But while the majority at Neumos loved his set, Charles’ observation (“K'naan's show was not about hiphop but a globalized solution of rock”) strikes me as accurate, though I certainly didn’t hate what was happening onstage.

It might be more appropriate to call K’naan a world-music artist who uses rap and rock as a framework to convey his inspirational message—or maybe we should accept that hiphop is a mutable, amoeba-like organism, able to accommodate many styles under its rubric. I certainly don’t want to be dogmatic on this topic. I recall loving the band Live Human, who created brilliant instrumental hiphop with “real” instruments in real time.

K’naan’s band excelled at uptempo funk rock, but when the paced slowed, when the star sat down, and when an acoustic guitar was brandished, things turned coffeehouse-ish dull.

I left the venue thinking that K’naan is getting cut some slack by Westerners (critics, mainly) for being a Somalian with a tough history. The fact that he’s even alive and rhyming in sophisticated English is amazing enough in its own way, but his actual music sounds like a merely competent major-label compromise between rap and rock, with modest sprinklings of African rhythmic and vocal tics. Under more scrupulous scrutiny, K'naan may just be (whisper it) something like Somalia’s G. Love & Special Sauce.

Photo by Jackie Canchola.