1 – K’naan

This Somali-born, Canadian-raised hiphop artist moves me every time I hear him sing. He does it singing in a genre I don’t care for, with a voice I don’t especially like. His name means Traveller, and that’s what he’s been since the age of 11, when his mother got him and his brother out of Mogadishu. He taught himself English by learning to sing other artist’s hiphop songs phonetically, then he started writing his own. But there’s something more to a K’naan song – he makes me glad the genre didn’t die out (as I so difinitively once declared it would).