K'naan

“My question about my art and my music has always been, 'Am I good, or am I good because?' I'm not the artist who wants to have the 'because' attached.”

“I'm writing from a place of - a center of authenticity, somewhere that only I know how to write from.”

“I wasn't making music consciously when I was younger. I was a musician, but that has its own stigmas. Anywhere on the planet, it's one of the more undervalued positions.”

“I'm not about trying to get and get and get. I feel good when I get, but I kind of feel better when I give.”

“The people of Somalia just do not have a voice. They are to me the most forgotten people in the world.”

“From the stage, I can reach a large audience, and you learn from being on stage how much a song reaches, what extent of the crowd a song can reach. I write in a way that can reach most of the audience, but I also wanted to have truly intimate moments as well, many intimate moments, more so than the big moments.”

“I don't feel political most of the time. Sometimes I'm placed in positions because no one else will go there.”

“I have moments of darkness, of anger, and moments of rage. They do creep up at the most inopportune times. Not to recognize that in my music would give people a sense of sainthood that I don't necessarily have or even want to have.”

“Somalis really are very musically sophisticated, and they're about their own thing.”

“I am one of those people that's never been really cynical about life, you know.”

“The problem is that rap is so often a caricature of its own image. Nobody comes to the table with the seriousness of the effect that it can have; nobody is prepared for that.”

“I know that often times a lot of people who work in music, whether they be labels and so on or even artists, want personal recognition. We want to be recognized for something, for what we did. I'd rather my song be recognized for what it's doing and that's important. It's not so important how many people know me.”

“You have to let the world speak to you and then you speak, you know, so I'm in that moment now where I'm finding the world's voice.”

“The poetry I grew up on is really an intense form of poetry; it's so pure and powerful.”

“I'm an optimist about other people. I'm not an optimist about myself.”

“The only way I see the world now is through coming out of and growing up and living in Somalia. In the time of war, everyone was basically trying to live and manage the best they could. But you also had another period which was not a hard time at all - it was just a beautiful time. I lived in both eras.”

“Art isn't held with the same high regard as it is after success. In any country, in any language, you're a loser if you're making music until you prove otherwise.”

“Hip-hop in Africa has been very often a duplication of an American experience, but in a context that's totally alien to it.”

“I enjoy meditation. I think the artist's position is often to mend the things we feel are broken. Whether that's between two cultures or two thoughts. We're always trying to reach, trying to expand something.”

“It's not really that I'm interested in filmmaking. I'm interested in the instrument of it, you know.”