Artist K’Naan is a Somalia born rapper who moved to Canada during the Somalia Civil War. His song “What’s Hardcore,” uses Somalia as a site of memory to question the authenticity of American artists. K’Naan argues that that Africa he know is responsible for the blurring of ghettocentrism and the Africanist Aesthetic. In his song he says, “What they do every day just to eat, lord of mercy | strapped with an AK and they bloodthirsty,” and “harder than Harlem and Compton intertwined,” these, along with several other descriptive lines describing his hometown, paints an image of what ghettocentrism seems to be based off of.

The Nommo energy that K’Naan harnesses with his lyrics, pound in the message that his upbringing in Africa gives him the more authentic story, not as a matter of skin color but, as a matter of what ghetto you grew up in. The war that he grew up in, he claims could, “make 50-cent look like Limp Bizkit.” There is a break in the song where he repeats the line “we begin our day by the weight of the gun | rocket propelled grenades blow you away if you frontin’. | We got no police ambulance or firefighters | we start riots by burning car tires.” The repletion of this line is over a troubled laughter sealing in the effect of these words.

Song link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3QmuH1NW9Q&feature=related

Reference:

Halifu Osumare, “Hip-Hop Aesthetics Historically and Globally,” and “Dope Rhymes: Nommo & the Power of the Word,” The Africanist Aesthetic in Global Hip-Hop: Power Moves, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, pp. 28-43.

By: Alexander Handy