I. INTRODUCTION
This particular post is a brief examination of "Wavin' Flag," a song by Canadian/Somali rapper K'naan. Here is the album version of the song, off of his LP Troubador. I first heard of K'naan via NPR's Tiny Desk concert series (Here is the set, including "Wavin' Flag" in acoustic form). Like many artists featured on NPR, K'naan was not very well known, at least in the US. As he raps in "Take A Minute" during the NPR set: "My man Akon is gettin' awards and covers now; this is K'naan and still reppin' the S [Somalia], coming outta Mogadish' and still draped in the mess." Akon is a Senegalese rapper who rose to prominence in 2005/2006.
Though his rap in the 2009 NPR appearance (and the very fact of that appearance) hints at his still-unknown status, 2010 brought and is bringing global recognition for K'naan, via Coca-Cola, 2010 World Cup, and "Wavin' Flag (Celebration Mix)." [Punctuation and grammar enthusiasts: Is that the right way to write that? The song title ends with a parenthesis, the song title is marked off by quotation marks, and sentence ends with the song title, so I figured )." was the correct sequence, but I could also see an argument for )". ]
II. K'NAAN & AKON
Anyway, the song has taken off, with multiple remixes (there's 2 links there--check them both!) and lots of commercial airplay (I heard it in a pre-movie Coca-Cola commercial at Regal Cinemas). I'd like to look at "Wavin' Flag (Celebration Mix)" in terms of K'naan's career. First, a disclaimer: I don't know anything about hip-hop/rap. That said, judging from the fact that I had at least heard of him before I started researching this post, and from his wikipedia page, Akon is fairly mainstream. He is associated, in one way or another, with Snoop Dogg, Young Jeezy, Eminem, Lady Gaga, etc. He has been in jail and in dubious legal proceedings for various crimes. His stage shows and lyrics have been accused of being overly sexual and misogynistic. He is, in other words, the quintessential rapper.
K'naan, however, is different. Both he and Akon grew up in immigrant families. Both were born in and spent time in Africa (Somalia and Senegal, respectively). But K'naan's rap is much more politically aware and active (see below). He has (according to wikipedia) been in no notable legal trouble, and speaks out against the gangster aesthetic of mainstream rap.
III. SELLOUT?
This is not a "what went wrong" analysis of Akon, with K'naan put on a pedestal. Instead, I present the differences because K'naan himself invites the comparison in the lyric quoted above, and because "Wavin' Flag (Celebration Mix)" could (and, to some extent already has) catapult(ed) K'naan to the kind of fame that Akon has/had. My question is about the nature of commercial success, fame, and "selling out." K'naan's new remix is for and from Coca-Cola, and every (legal) appearance of the song is branded as such (ie, the opening shot in the video for the Spanish language remix). It is also for the 2010 World Cup; that is, it is Coca-Cola's promotional song for the Cup, it is not officially related to the Cup except via Coca-Cola. Neither Coca-Cola nor the 2010 World Cup is a musical producer or dsitributor. Both are multinational commercial entities seeking to promote an image of international unity despite (at least in Coca-Cola's case) dubious international practices. K'naan's decision to re-record his song for Coca-Cola is one that could have caught him some serious flack from the activist community (accusations of selling out, etc.) but as far as I've seen, K'naan's reputation as a politically active rapper has been untarnished; he is "still reppin' the S."
That said, "Wavin' Flag (Celebration Mix)" is lyrically de-fanged. It includes a sing-along "whoah-oh-oh" chorus and a section extolling the virtues of soccer as a force of (inter?)national unity ("see the champions / take the field now / unify us / make us feel proud"). These sections are notably absent from the original, album version, and they replace sections referring to real-world poverty ("so we struggling, fighting to eat / and we wonderin' when we'll be free"). These decisions make the "Celebration Mix" appended to the title a much more loaded classification--though "Wavin' Flag" was, in its original form, a feel-good anthem, it did not ignore the realities of K'naan and Somalia. The Celebration Mix glosses over these real issues in favor of abstract, greeting-card platitudes about unity and soccer.
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IV. CONCLUSION
I'd like to postualte that it is K'naan's relatively unknown status that allows him to make this particular career decision. He is not being called out as a sellout because the only people who would call him out are his small core fan base, who are happy to see him gaining success and international exposure (yours truly included). Thus, unknown status served to protect K'naan. It is a career move that will only work once--"Wavin' Flag (Celebration Mix)" will (hopefully) make K'naan into a household name. It remains to be seen whether mainstream success will take him the way of Akon, or whether he will return to his activist roots.
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Sorry for a really long post. My academic gears are still turning. The conclusion is a little sloppy, they tell me, but really this post is just to let y'all hear this fun song before it gets overplayed in all the World Cup hoopla.
FOR DISCUSSION (what this post was originally going to be about):
What is "the song?" What is it that makes all the version of "Wavin' Flag" the same song? Are they the same song?
1 comment:
If K'naan hasn't been accused of being a sellout, I think it's only because our generation no longer has a concept of "selling out." Back in the 70's, you had huge rock stars like Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen who refused to license their songs to any advertisers, and they were able to do so, because they made enough money that they could afford not to. But the economics of the music industry today necessitates that smaller acts sell songs to advertisers, since people steal so much music that there's no way to make a living doing it. Check out this list of "top ten car commercials:
http://stereogum.com/8542/esquires_top_ten_car_commercial_songs_of_the_year/list/
You'll notice that half of the selected car commercials feature music by Wilco, a band that still has plenty of artistic respect and credibility. Whereas back in the 1970's, this might have knocked Wilco down a peg or two in the artistic hierarchy, today, rock critics still talk about them as if they're one of the great artistic bands in America today. I think part of this is economics, but part of it is also media saturation. We see advertisements everywhere today, and carry media everywhere we go, so people are more inured to the effects of advertising. So, while old rock stars like Bruce Springsteen might still wave the old-style flag of "artistic credibility" and refuse to "sell out," younger artists are growing up with no concept of a divide between "respectable" platforms for music, like albums, and "nonrespectable" platforms for that same music, like advertisements, since music is everywhere and is consumed in so many different forms today.
That was longer than I intended it to be. Sorry about that.
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