Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival

At age 9, K'naan was doing what most American kids were doing. He was hanging out on his neighborhood street corner, MC'ing for his friends, dropping Nas and Rakim verses, dreaming of a day when he would posses the lyrical skills and the rhythmic flow of his hip hop heroes.  However, K'naan was very different from those American kids. In fact, he wasn't even an American at all, but African. He wasn't on the streets of New York or Detroit, but on the dusty streets of Mogadishu Somali. Although he was rapping verses from Nas and Rakim and all the other great American MC's, he could not speak English.

As hip-hop passes the quarter century mark, it has evolved in ways no one could have imagined. It has gone from underground to mainstream, from black to multi-racial, from American to international. It has reached the very furthest corners of the world and planted its seeds in the souls of kids from every country. K'naan is a child of that generation, the first generation of true hip-hop children who have grown out of a very foreign soil.

K'naan has "a sound that fuses Bob Marley, conscious American hip hop, and brilliant protest poetry".  He creates urgent "music with a message" because his whole existence depends on it. Since releasing his critically acclaimed 2005 debut, K’Naan has collaborated and toured with Dead Prez, Mos Def, Nelly Furtado, Talib Kweli, Pharaohe Monch, The Roots, Damian Marley, and many more.