K'naan

I went from feeling deeply happy after the Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros set to feeling deeply inspired during and after the K’naan set. And I know how cheesy that sounds, but it’s kind of impossible to listen to K’naan or to see that uptilted smile of his without feeling like he’s onto something big. And judging by the size of the crowd swarming his stage, K’naan is definitely onto something big.

He opened the set with two of his more aggressive tracks, “ABC’s” and “I Come Prepared”, quickly bringing everyone to attention with the polished, harder-hitting beats before seamlessly easing into the musical territory that associate most closely K’naan–the earthier, more eloquent sounds of “Fatima”, “Strugglin’”, and “Be Free”. I was pretty pleasantly surprised by how gentle and tuneful his singing voice was, since I fully expected flawless rap/spoken word from him, but a much more amateurish singing style.

One of the most successful meldings of K’naan’s harder edge and his eloquence happened on “In the Beginning”, where his voice was a nasal whine usually on the verge of an all-out scream, but this harshness was softened by the la-la-la’s and light hand claps in the background. This meeting of soft but powerful created the perfect mood for the remainder of the set, with K’naan wrapping things up with a chorus-only rendition of “Take A Minute” (another abridged number that left me pouting), and ended his set with the obvious choice of “Wavin’ Flag.”          

Outdoor music festivals can sometimes make or break these fist-pumping, anthemic tracks, because if you can’t get a huge crowd of people rallying behind a song that is essentially made for the enjoyment of huge crowds of people, then that song has failed in its purpose. Luckily, “Wavin’ Flag” did not suffer such a fate: from beginning to end, hands were up in the air (waving like they really, really cared) and that unique, all-consuming optimism brought on by thousands of people singing along to a song everybody knows was running rampant. And I was totally swept up in it. It’s the kind of moment I laugh about now because it’s such a cliché, but mostly I just want to go back and feel that rampant optimism again.

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