Taking Hip Hop Back to Africa

Critics and fans alike have long awaited K’naan’s sophomore album. He brings it with all its unpaved street cred on Troubadour, his major label debut. I never thought I’d say this, but the majors have so far been good to him.

K’naan hails from the exotic shores of Toronto by way of Mogadishu, a city most Americans haven’t considered since the failed U.N. peacekeeping mission during the start of the Clinton administration. Taking the last commercial flight from Somalia, he’s come all this way to inject new blood into the rap world. Even the game’s own giants have pronounced hip hop dead, or rather, that it’s become a cannibalistic shell made of clichés of bitches and bling with all the style and grace of a Swarovski-encrusted iPod. K’naan’s different, he says, because the streets of Mogadishu are far more dangerous than anything in the inner city, and that seems key to his posture as an MC.

On his debut album, 2005’s The Dusty Foot Philosopher, K’naan’s material and delivery couldn’t always come together long enough to sustain a whole song, much less a whole album. This time, he’s sharpened his skills and actually delivers that lyrical one-two punch, aided in no small part by some gussied-up studio production. Take breakout single “If Rap Gets Jealous” for example. In its original form, the words and delivery seemed to putter out of steam by the end of each line. This time, they’ve been simplified to gain focus and pop accessibility, and the result is proof that Kirk Hammett is the only remaining member of Metallica who doesn’t suck. At his best, K’naan spins a vivid yarn, as on “Fatima,” a wistful tale of the crumpled dreams of lovers separated by war, and on “ABCs,” an upbeat but unsweetened glimpse of institutionalized poverty in the city.

Perhaps best of all, Troubadour manages to infuse the scene with new sounds without screaming about how different it is. Just as tacky gadgetheads would waste good crystal on a portable device, the last decade of hip hop has traded ethnic samples as accessories, even flashing American soul as some sort of novelty. Troubadour’s production provides rich understatement — just enough to make you take notice and wonder where these sounds came from, but not enough to bait the ethnic music hipster nazis whose insistence on consuming foreignness plays itself as ironically closed-minded.

Not all of it works, though. His collabo with Maroon 5 front man Adam Levine — seriously? — and its stiffly lilting rock beat sounds eerily like “Livin’ La Vida Loca” until the bridge, when the background vocals take on wider range, giving them a faint trace of Gnarls Barkley. Even the ambitiously named “America,” featuring Mos Def and Chali 2na doesn’t sustain the energy of the decidedly more downtempo but evocatively melodic “Wavin’ Flag” and “Somalia.” Even though K’naan’s sing-songy tracks have a definite adult contemporary feel to them, that can only serve to widen his audience in this post-Kelly Clarkson world we live in.