K’naan – Troubador
Through the latter half of high school and the bulk of my undergrad I listened to hip-hop, almost exclusively. I progressively got out of it, I’m not exactly sure why, but probably because the artists I really liked – the mainstays of “conscious (which, I think is a retarded term) hip-hop” Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Blackalicous – just started putting out crap… or I got sick of their stuff… or whatever. Interestingly, the same sort of thing happened when I started to listen to bands like Death Cab, the Decemberists, so, maybe this says more about me than anything else….
Anyways, during my hip-hop period – when I used to watch Rapcity, and order albums of hiphopsite.com – I heard K’Naan do a verse of a VA song for Warchild, and, when his first album The Dusty Foot Philosopher came out I felt like the Juno voters finally did something right when they gave him the Juno for Best Rap Album. The album, to me, felt like a fusion of (what I can only assume is traditional) Somolian music, and some of the more thoughtful hip-hop being put out. The stories, the pain, all seemed very authentic, and, by extension, much more (in the words of Brody Jenner) real.
Troubador, by contrast, while still good, seems… much less “real”. The contrast, I think (although I could just be making this up), is most clear on the two versions of “If Rap Gets Jealous” on TDFP vs. the song on Troubador ft. Kirk Hammett of Metalica. The former is much more conversational, more like K’Naan is telling a story, while the later kind of sounds like it was produced by John Mayer.
So, all this is not to say that I don’t like the album (otherwise it wouldn’t be my pick of the week – although, I’ll admit, this pick is pretty half-hearted), because there are some undeniably great songs on the album: “T.I.A. (This is Africa)”, “Fatima” (which would’ve been completely out of character on TDFP), “Fire in Freetown”, and… you know what I’m going to go ahead and say basically every with a guest ruins the song… this album would be 5 to 15 times better if there were no guests on it, but c’est la vie…
I’d be lying if I said I thought this’ll be on my year end list, after all there are 52 weeks in the year and I try and usually narrow things down to 20-30 albums, but if you kind of like hip-hop Troubador is worth giving a once through… and if you haven’t heard it The Dusty Foot Philosopher is very much worth a listen.
[mp3] K’naan – T.I.A.
[mp3] K’naan – ABCs ft. Chubb Rock
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Tags: album
“while the later kind of sounds like it was produced by John Mayer.”
Should be “latter”.