Track 1 Hip Hop as Dusty Foot Philosophy

When asked what he means by the Dusty Foot Philosopher (the title of his recent CD, which received a 2006 Juno Award for Rap Recording of the Year, and was nominated for the inaugural Polaris Music Prize), Somali-Canadian MC K’Naan explains that this is both how he sees himself and a broader image of global representation. When images of Africa are shown on charity television (the most common means by which people view Africa, he suggests), the camera always kind of pans to the feet, and the feet are always dusty from these kids. What they’re trying to portray is a certain bias connected to their own historical reasoning, and what I saw though instead, was that that child with the dusty feet himself is not a beggar, and he’s not an undignifi ed struggler, but he’s the dusty foot philosopher. He articulates more than the cameraman can imagine, at that point in his life. But he has nothing; he has no way to dream, even. He just is who he is. (K’Naan interview, April 25, 2004)1 In his track “For Mohamoud (Soviet)” he explains further: Dusty foot philosopher means the one that’s poor, lives in poverty but lives in a dignifi ed manner and philosophizes about the universe and talks about things that well-read people talk about, but they’ve never read or traveled on a plane. (K’Naan, 2005) K’Naan’s vision raises several key themes we wish to pursue here. By looking at Hip Hop as dusty foot philosophy, as both grounded in the local and the real, and capable of articulating a broader sense of what life is about, K’Naan is not only talking about localization, about the ways in which Hip Hop becomes a means for the local articulation of identity, but also about a deeper sense of locality. To have one’s feet in the dust is an image of localization that goes beyond appropriation of sounds, or references to local contexts. It speaks to a particular groundedness, a relationship to the earth that is about both pleasure and politics. To walk barefoot is to be located in a particular way. In his adopted home, Canada, the impossibility of walking barefoot makes him “feel like a foreigner.” By contrast, “walking on the sand with your bare feet is therapeutic, you feel the sun” (Interview). Far from being a trivial point only about the weather or sartorial politics, this is a much more signifi cant issue to do with the ways in which our histories, bodies, desires, and localities are intertwined.

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