Ironies don’t come any more tart than the one that faced K’naan shortly after his performance at the World Cup opening ceremony. As the Somali rapper helped to usher in the tournament with his current UK hit Wavin’ Flag, Islamist militants in the country where he spent his first 13 years were trying to ban anyone watching him do so. On the weekend that Somalia’s pop export won global fame, two deaths were reported after extremists stormed a house in Mogadishu where a crowd had gathered to watch a game.
This expanded reissue of his 2009 album suggests that the violence won’t have surprised him. Setting the braggadocio of Americans such as 50 Cent and the Game into perspective, T.I.A. goes: “I take rappers on a field trip any day ... I know where all the looters and the shooters stay/ Welcome to the city we call Doomsday.” On ABCs, wit and grit vie with each other to disarming effect: “These streets ain’t paved with no gold/ Matter fact someone stole the light bulb/ Nobody fat enough for lypo.” In less dextrous hands, it might have all ended up sounding like a lecture. More often, the music — hip-hop shot through with supple East African syncopations — snaps into line with the energy of a man who counts his blessings daily. Dreamer fizzes with more joie de vivre than any song about growing up in a war zone ought to, while his lost-love vignette Fatima recalls the plaintive oeuvre of fellow émigré Wyclef Jean.
Detractors will be swift to draw attention to the versions of Wavin’ Flag bolted on to the end of Troubadour. Re-angled for Coca-Cola, which adopted it as its World Cup theme, lyrics that once addressed “so many wars” and “settling scores” now refer to a single football match. Anyone who takes the Bill Shankly view that football isn’t a matter of life and death but “much more important than that” won’t mind. More to the point, nor will anyone directed by that song to an album that so deftly alchemises its creator’s turbulent life into so much life-affirming pop music.
(AandM; out Mon)