K'Naan and Nneka bring African realities to America in song

CHICAGO — When rapper K'Naan was recording songs peppered with tales about warfare, poverty and despair in his native Somalia, there were people who told him he should consider abandoning his socially conscious frame of mind for material that wasn't so somber.

Most of those people were Somalis, K'Naan recalls.

"They didn't want someone's shining talent to be wasted on such a disaster," K'Naan said recently. "They wanted to see themselves out there, and they knew there was rarely a chance that you could do it while carrying the baggage of Somalia. So they would say, 'Put it down and just go and be a star like these other people are.' "

But K'Naan, along with a new generation of African-born singers like Nneka, who plays Seattle's Crocodile on Thursday, are getting acclaim these days by using their experiences to express political messages, varied life experiences and sounds influenced by their years on the continent.

K'Naan, who now lives in Canada, had a global audience recently when he performed a remixed version of his song "Wavin' Flag" at the kickoff concert for the World Cup. Though the original lyrics, a bittersweet homage to his native Somalia, had been changed to talk about a general celebration of nationality, he held the Somali flag up high on stage, something he never thought possible.

"It had been buried under a rubble of bad stories for 20 years now. Nobody expects to see the Somali flag in a beautiful moment," he said.

While promoting her critically acclaimed album "Concrete Jungle" recently in Chicago, Nneka paused on stage at a dim bar to educate the crowd to problems stemming from the oil industry in Nigeria — "just for your American information," Nneka said jokingly.

Nneka then channeled fellow Nigerian and Afrobeat icon Fela Kuti, instructing the predominantly white crowd of 20-somethings to join her in singing the late singer's "V.I.P. (Vagabonds in Power)."

"I think it's important ... especially coming out of an area like the Niger Delta," she said of her music's African themes. "I think it is my responsibility to speak about the issues that the normal person is confronted with on a daily basis and with issues [such as] corruption, and pollution and exploitation."

Tackling tough topics has mixed effects on an artist's success in crossing over to the mainstream.

"I think it's a double-edged sword. On one hand young people are more politicized than they've ever been. And Africa is certainly coming to focus in a way it hasn't before, especially with young people," said Jason King, an associate professor at New York University's Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music.

"On the other hand, we're living in a time when there's this great residue of xenophobia — sort of distrust of foreigners and aliens that you see in Arizona and Nebraska and other places," King continues. "There's that continual resistance that Americans have to finding out what's going on in the rest of the world. And that's limiting the chance for success for some of these artists."

K'Naan acknowledges that it's difficult to get heard amid the music of Lady Gaga and other pop music.

"Let's be honest, that [political music] doesn't get played on radio," he said.