Zitat des Tages von K'naan:
Art isn't held with the same high regard as it is after success. In any country, in any language, you're a loser if you're making music until you prove otherwise.
I enjoy mediation. I think the artist's position is often to mend the things we feel are broken. Whether that's between two cultures or two thoughts. We're always trying to reach, trying to expand something.
From the stage, I can reach a large audience, and you learn from being on stage how much a song reaches, what extent of the crowd a song can reach. I write in a way that can reach most of the audience, but I also wanted to have truly intimate moments as well, many intimate moments, more so than the big moments.
It was not my dream to be an artist. How could it have been? I thought, artist, much like a leader, was something you either were or weren't. Never something you set out to be.
To reach your goal authentically is probably, in the end, going to mean much more to you than having reached it in a false way.
Hip-hop in Africa has been very often a duplication of an American experience, but in a context that's totally alien to it.
The only way I see the world now is through coming out of and growing up and living in Somalia. In the time of war, everyone was basically trying to live and manage the best they could. But you also had another period which was not a hard time at all - it was just a beautiful time. I lived in both eras.
I'm not about trying to get and get and get. I feel good when I get, but I kind of feel better when I give.
Somalis really are very musically sophisticated, and they're about their own thing.
The poetry I grew up on is really an intense form of poetry; it's so pure and powerful.
I'm an optimist about other people. I'm not an optimist about myself.
I wasn't making music consciously when I was younger. I was a musician, but that has its own stigmas. Anywhere on the planet, it's one of the more undervalued positions.
