Labels in Hip-Hop, like in anything else, can be misleading. Being labeled a "conscious rapper" can doom an artist to both a rep as a softie and to mainstream anonymity and commercial insignificance. But there is nothing weak about Ian Kamau, his art and his activism or the subjects he tackles in his rhymes.
While most rappers in Toronto and south of the border stick to the well-worn path of raps about crack, brand names, bottles and models, Kamau dares to tell true stories about life in our communities, not some exaggerated criminal past or unrealistic, luxurious fantasy.
The real world is a hard one in which neither crime nor a university degree pays and on his debut album One Day Soon, Kamau uses his spoken word delivery to tell these difficult truths, while expressing hope in his people's power to make change. In the late '90s hip-hop tried to gloss over gangsta rap as "reality rap," but Kamau's disc is more deserving of that label than any G-Funk Era hit.
On One Day Soon's opener "Heading Home," he balances those truths with hope, rapping, "The hardest of roads we walk, untraveled/The way we made the world it unraveled/So now the balance is skewed/we were fooled, like lambs to the slaughter."
He explores our immigrant parents' quest to create community in Canada in "The Village," One Day Soon's first video, rhyming, "It takes one to raise a child/And it's hard to be here, but we're staying a while/with the wind at our faces, and cold in our bones/So we still have a problem with calling this home."
The Village Trailer (One Day Soon) from Ian Kamau on Vimeo.
The album's best track is "Black Bodies," a scathing criticism of those playing the gangster role--"So now we love the ghetto/We think it's our home/The streets are our kingdom/The corner our throne," and the true perpetrators of black-on-black violence: "A shame/Every day another name to discuss/Flood the streets with their guns and they blame it on us." If "Black Bodies" is familiar, it's because it includes lines from Kamau's epic, crowd-stunning a cappella performance at the 2008 ManifesTO festival, as does the aforementioned "Heading Home."
Kamau speaks on love and relationships on "Now That I'm Alone" and "In Love Again" without mentioning Victoria's Secret panties or red-bottoms once. He also tests out his voice on the funky, happy "Hopes & Dreams" and the jerk-flavoured "Traffic" before finishing with the 44-second outro "Renaissance" and probably the truest statement of the entire album: "we'll never have a Renaissance if we speak about a movement and refuse to move."
For those of us who know Kamau from his thought-provoking poems and 16's on Shad's The Old Prince and Juno-winning TSOL albums, One Day Soon is a long overdue success well worth the wait. It is intelligent; musically dope and everything that hip-hop should be, without being confined by what we think hip-hop should be.
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