Top 32 K'naan Quotes
#1. I enjoy mediation. 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.
K'naan
#2. 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.
K'naan
#3. It was not my dream to be an artist. How could it have been? I thought, artist, much like a leader, was something you either were or weren't. Never something you set out to be.
K'naan
#4. I think it's a mistake to work on success in career. I've worked on my passions obsessively. How can I say what I want to say more precisely than the last time I said it? Success is such an elusive concept. When you work for it, I think you get it in a way you might regret it.
K'naan
#5. I don't feel political most of the time. Sometimes I'm placed in positions because no one else will go there.
K'naan
#6. It's better to light a candle than to curse the dark
In the eyes of the youth, there are question marks
K'naan
#7. When I get older, I will be stronger
K'naan
#8. I am one of those people that's never been really cynical about life, you know.
K'naan
#9. It was interesting to find how dominating American vision is all over the world. I think there's something to be said about the world's mindset and its economics and all of that, and I think it affects the way we see ourselves and it affects music.
K'naan
#10. 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.
K'naan
#11. I'm an optimist about other people. I'm not an optimist about myself.
K'naan
#12. Somalis really are very musically sophisticated, and they're about their own thing.
K'naan
#13. And any man who knows a thing, knows he knows not a damn, damn thing at all ...
K'naan
#14. 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.
K'naan
#15. Until the lion learns to speak, the tales of hunting will be weak.
K'naan
#16. 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.
K'naan
#17. It is the very survival of the streets that makes children pick up guns in Somalia, not some older, wide-eyed rebel leader. My intimate experiences during these years are something which I have shared with people through my music but am very careful about how they are addressed.
K'naan
#18. You want to reach people, but you also want to reach them in the most authentic way. You now have a mass market and an audience that's listening, but they're in love with a song that means absolutely nothing to you.
K'naan
#19. 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.
K'naan
#20. 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.
K'naan
#21. Hip-hop in Africa has been very often a duplication of an American experience, but in a context that's totally alien to it.
K'naan
#22. It's not really that I'm interested in filmmaking. I'm interested in the instrument of it, you know.
K'naan
#23. 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. I got to fully experience and appreciate both the tragedy of Somalia and the beauty of it.
K'naan
#24. The poetry I grew up on is really an intense form of poetry; it's so pure and powerful.
K'naan
#25. It's not longer 'Look what I can do, I can do it better then you.' It's just I am.
K'naan
#26. When I get older, I will be stronger
They'll call me freedom, just like a Wavin' Flag
K'naan
#27. My life owes me. Like an overdose, I'm slowly
Drifting into the arms of trouble, then trouble holds me
K'naan
#28. 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.
K'naan
#29. The people of Somalia just do not have a voice. They are to me the most forgotten people in the world.
K'naan
#30. I'm writing from a place of - a center of authenticity, somewhere that only I know how to write from.
K'naan
#31. To reach your goal authentically is probably, in the end, going to mean much more to you than having reached it in a false way.
K'naan
#32. I faced quite a few challenging times, and in front of those, I was more positive than some people not facing those conditions. I'm actually of the belief now that it is that struggle that offers you that open-hearted hope.
K'naan
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