K’Naan played hip-hop, several styles of African music, and lavish pop hooks Tuesday at The Annex, and his stage presence didn’t recall a typical MC. Even when he told the crowd, “I’ll be quite honest with you, I’m not feeling the energy in here,” he didn’t sound like a rapper trying to bark his audience into an exaggerated frenzy. “We don’t make imposition music,” he explained. He emphasizes musical variety over all that tiresome “Lemme hear ya say HO-OOO!” business. The Somali-Canadian singer-rapper and band had a lot of territory to cover, from songs of freedom to rapped boasts about making “50 Cent look like Limp Bizkit” (probably nothing Fiddy couldn’t do for himself, but witty all the same), from old African-music samples to triumphantly over-the-top guitar solos.
Second vocalist Rayzak, a guitar player, a keyboardist/laptop guy, and a drummer struck the opening chords of “In The Beginning,” as K’Naan strapped an African hand drum under one arm and brightened the room with the song’s vocal melody and quick, chant-like phrasing. Despite some glittery synthesizer tones, the live sound generally stripped away the polish of KNaan’s albums. Here, it was a lot easier to notice how impressive K’Naan is as a singer, if only because a CD doesn’t actually show him easing between styles from minute to minute. His drummer (K’Naan introduced him as “Spanky”) kept the eclectic rhythms going with nothing more than a simple kit. “Soobax” mixes the throb of a club track with a mysterious African shuffle, and the drummer made sure it translated clearly and urgently. In fact, he looked eager on such resourceful numbers but a little bored when playing more straight-ahead parts on songs like “If Rap Gets Jealous,” deferring to the blaring guitar parts that Metallica’s Kirk Hammett plays on the forthcoming Troubadour.
The crowd filled up the better part of The Annex’s floor, but didn’t always know what to make of it—after all, do people come out to a K’Naan show expecting rap, world music, or what, exactly? Some fans got up front to unravel blue-and-white Somali flags, some swayed along with easygoing hip-hop hand-waving, still others did the standing-still-at-attention thing that’s so common in Madison. K’Naan explained how “America” was “The beginning of the sound of the new album,” mixing hip hop and an Ethiopian jazz sample from the ’60s. Meantime, “Dusty Streets” loped along to an elegant, R-rolling vocal that might sound Arabic to American ears, and K’Naan smoothly quieted things down for the moody reggae-pop of “Fire In Freetown.”
K’Naan didn’t seem to mind throwing people for a loop, especially on his faithful cover of Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida.” “What’s the matter, don’t K’Naan fans like Coldplay?” he said after the song. “They make great melodies.” In fact, sometimes they’re easier to appreciate when they’re not coming from over-dramatic old Chris Martin. If it’s ever occurred to K’Naan that the tune’s off-genre or out of demographic or any of that business nonsense, it didn’t seem to bother him. As he says on "If Rap Gets Jealous": "It don't worry me if motherfuckers don't get it." After this introduction, maybe different K’Naan fans who come to the music for different reasons can just agree to like that attitude.
Either way, everyone seemed pretty surprised not to get an encore. Maybe the last four songs were intended as the encore, judging from the gap in the setlist that often implies a break between the set proper and the "extra" songs. The band didn’t leave the stage in between, so it’s hard to say. Whatever the case, a dozen songs is reasonable, though people were cheering for more even as the house music came back on.
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