Guest Editor: This post is Written by Jenny, my ever dedicated concert compadre

So, you know those really annoying people who do something, like, I dunno, pop out a kid and it’s all they can coherently talk about for the next 18 years? I thought I was going to be like that with my new puppy (hi, Thomas!), but I’m not. Instead I will talk until your ears bleed about the absolutely transformative night I had with K’naan.



It might seem odd to any new person I meet that Hip Hop is my favorite genre of music. I grew up in one of the most affluent suburbs in America and my mom was the president of the PTA and my dad was a stock broker. You can say that on paper, I’m about as white as a white girl can be. But when a random guy at the K’naan concert looked at Sarah and me and our reactions to the show and said “damn, you girls have got some RHYTHM!” I thought, “Baby, you’ve got no idea”.



It seems fitting, almost prescient, that we began the night discussing Wallace Stevens’ poetry (odd to the casual observer, perhaps, but that’s why Sarah is my favorite girl in Chicago). I waxed eloquent (or as eloquent as I could, considering the vodka) on the beauty of poetry, complex ideas made even more profound through the importance of each individual word in a line. I explained to Sarah that it is in those moments, surrounded by the brilliance of the language, that my mind comes alive. I overanalyze everything, almost to a fault, but I can blame it on my passion for language, and my extensively liberal arts focused education- and the fact that I’m a woman.



It is in this intense love of everything linguistic that I found my passion for Hip Hop. Sarah has said it to me, and published it here in her blog, her trepidation for seeing a techno show because she feels “like there’s going to be less of a personal connection with the audience cause he’s going to have this huge set up literally blocking him from his fans”. In Hip Hop, you literally have a man, a mic, and you. You are connected so personally to everything that the MC is saying because he is laying it bare on the stage for you. The way an MC can spin a rhyme to tell a story and share his vision is so intensely personal, I feel like I’m getting the chance to read their diary.



When K’naan took the stage (in a fantastic furry hat) I was a bit apprehensive. I knew that he had penned the theme song for this year’s World Cup, but that was it. A few songs in I was mesmerized by the timber of his voice, his intense –but never over the top- enthusiasm, and the way he could spin rhymes in an almost hypnotizing way. I was thoroughly entertained, but still anxious for Wale to come to the stage. Then he introduced Kate. Kate is a 13 year old girl from Chicago that someone in K’naan’s crew had seen on YouTube playing an acoustic guitar and singing her own versions of K’naan’s songs. I’ve become a bit jaded when it comes to live shows. I expect for the most part a more self-involved, self promoting energy from the performers, but K’naan was entirely different. He gave the stage EXCLUSIVELY to a thirteen year old white girl in a track jacket- for an entire song. While she was decent, her performance didn’t take my breath away, but her connection with K’naan’s music did. I saw a girl transformed, an early pubescent girl so moved by an album that she dedicated herself to learning it, knew every song by heart, and sang the words as if she had written them in her own diary. Watching K’naan watch Kate play showed me again the power of the connection people can find through music. I thought “ok, this is definitely a man worth paying attention to”.

Following Kate’s performance (and a rousing cheer of “KATE! KATE! KATE! from the audience at the Metro), K’naan began to perform what I can only describe as my musical baptism. It was a story told in verse, slowly, set to music, deliberate, gut churning-ly painful, but with a disarming humor and honestly that left me feeling like my legs had melted into the floor and I would no longer be able to move from my spot. Listening to K’naan tell the story about how a night originally set out to chase girls ended up with his two best friends being gunned down on a beach in Somalia, followed by his mother’s reaction and their resulting refuge from a war-torn country left me gobsmacked. I was immediately reminded of one of my favorite lines from Wallace Stevens’ poem, The Necessary Angel:



The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have



The point Stevens makes here is the timeless importance of speaking the truth, and speaking it well. If a story is based on something unreal, initially it will shock and awe, but it is the truth in a matter that lets a message stand the test of time. This is by far the best way to describe the gift that K’naan gave to me last night. He explained, through Hip Hop lyrics, a story I had heard countless times before, but with such a raw and brutal honesty that I will never forget his message. It will stick with me through the rest of my life because it was anchored in an incredibly raw truth.



I will never apologize for my intense reaction to this show, I’m not a dramatic girl- never have been- but I know what a transformation feels like. And K’naan’s show transformed me by it’s adherence to the real and the beautifully raw medium in which he shared it. Thank you K’naan, and thank you Sarah, my music guru, without whom I’d never have had this amazing night.