FuckyeahAfricanmen

dynamicafrica:

@Okayafrica sat down with Somalia’s troubadour @Knaan to speak about transnational identities, the after-effects of having the most popular song in the world, and his new More Beautiful Than Silence EP.

My music is mostly about identity and, you know, the position that a person holds in the universal context.

I’ve always written about the question of why am I here? And, who am I? Thats been the theme of most great artists that I follow. It’s just been particularly more complex for me, having lived half of my live in Africa in Somalia and the other half in North America —Canada and the US.

But, I think that’s the kind of question we’re figuring out right now. We’re in a particularly engaged world, we’re in a particularly diverse world, we’re in an economic -driven world. That’s beginning to determine identity also. Whereas in the past it was the human being’s ancestral and spiritual history which determined identity, now its becoming economics.

I’m just a part of that journey and those are the kind of questions that I address in my music and those are the kind of feelings that I think my songs bring up. You know, songs like “Coming To America”.

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