K'naan's reinvention: how the rapper left music behind and became a movie director

"I worked very hard for the machine to forget me and I got my wish, whether I like it or not." 

K'naan and I are sitting inside the Library Bar in Toronto's Fairmont Royal York hotel on a Friday afternoon, mere hours before the world premiere of his debut feature film, Mother Mother, at this year's Toronto International Film Festival. But before he takes his first steps on the red carpet as a newly minted movie director, I had to ask him the question on many music fans' minds: where has the Somali-Canadian rapper been for the past decade? 

Born Keinan Abdi Warsame, K'naan is one of the country's most successful rappers. A four-time Juno Award winner and two-time Polaris Music Prize-shortlisted artist, Warsame is probably best known for his 2009 megahit, "Wavin' Flag," which went triple platinum and spawned multiple versions including an official mix used by Coca-Cola at the 2010 FIFA World Cup. In 2012, he released his fourth studio album, Country, God or the Girl. 

By that year's end, Warsame penned an op-ed for the New York Times where he candidly revealed the pressure he was put under while recording what has become his last public release. In it, he explained how his label approached him and suggested that he change his lyrical approach to speak less on his Somali history and roots, and more on his new audience growing in America. "And for the first time, I felt the affliction of success," he wrote at the time. "A question had raised its hand in the quiet of my soul: What do you do after success? What must you do to keep it?" 

Soon after that piece was published, he quietly disappeared from the limelight. 

As Warsame describes it now, that was by design. "I really wanted to have my sanity back," he admits. Even though Warsame had been making music for a decade by the time he released "Wavin' Flag," the overnight fame that came with that song was overwhelming. One's sense of self can start to blur with others' perceptions or ideas of you, and for a moment there, Warsame felt lost in the intersection of the two. "I really like being a person, so I wanted to claim that territory back," he says. "And it took a decade to do that."

'I was interested in film as early as I could remember' 

In the interim years, Warsame found solace slipping behind the scenes and exploring another passion of his: writing scripts. In 2013, he wrote his first script and got into Sundance's prestigious Directors Lab where he received support developing a project from the ground up. After years of translating ideas into music, Warsame wanted to see if he could do the same in the visual world. As with any art, he argues, "it's just trying to shorten the distance that is spanned between your feelings and the thing you've made." 

While his turn to film and TV may come as a surprise to some, Warsame has long been a cinephile. For years, he would frequent movie theatres four times a week and he boasts that his friends often turn to him for recommendations. "The truth is that I was interested in film as early as I could remember, as early as music if not earlier," he explains. 

Warsame's Sundance script never came to fruition, but he kept writing. HBO picked up one of them — a drama series called Mogadishu, Minnesota about Somali immigrants in Minneapolis, which was to be executive produced by director Kathryn Bigelow — but it never made it to air. His writing was starting to get noticed though, and soon he was tapped to help write and produce for series like Hulu's Castle Rock and Apple TV's Extrapolations. 

It was during the COVID-19 pandemic that the idea for Mother, Mother came to Warsame. In early 2020, he got a call from his mother that his aunt was sick and dying. Warsame's mother argued in favour of potential surgeries that could extend her sister's life, but her sister wasn't interested. Stuck in a deadlock, they turned to Warsame to make a decision. Without delving into the more painful details of this experience, Warsame tells me instead that this inspired him to think about difficult choices people make in life.

That became the central idea of his film, in which a Somali mother must make an important and consequential decision in the wake of her son's murder. "In my fictional world, it's like me getting them back," he jokes, about his mother and aunt. (The mother in the film is named Qalifo after his aunt; family members inspire the names and personalities of every character in the film, though Warsame clarifies that the film is entirely fictional.) 

Mother, Mother tells a character-driven story of humanity that has universal themes, but Warsame was adamant that he wanted to film it in Somalia where he could represent the beauty of his homeland. Warsame didn't see much proper representation of Somalia on film growing up. It's more common to see another location stand in as Somalia, or a movie made in Somalia by non-Somali filmmakers, but he's seeing a resurgence of Somali-made cinema now, which includes another TIFF title this year, Mo Harawe's The Village Next to Paradise. 

Warsame's film did have to split its shooting between Somalia and Kenya, mostly due to insurance reasons. "It's the most prohibitive word you can utter in the world of insurance: Somalia," he explains. "It brings to mind pirates, war and kidnappings…. I worked hard to convince people and show them how safe certain parts of Somalia are."

Many directors have inspired Warsame over the years, including David Lean, the Dardenne brothers and Andrey Zvyagintsev, but he singles out Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund's 2002 film City of God as the one that first got him thinking about making movies of his own. "I thought, 'If you could do this for Brazil, like if you could heal this country in this way," he says, "I wonder if I could do that for Somalia." 

The future of K'naan's music 

With Warsame's directing career finally taking off, he concedes that he's not completely done with music just yet. In fact, he has at least two albums' worth of music already complete and a small audience of people have already heard it. "I made it and I shared it with my friends," Warsame reveals. "The people who I want to know what I'm doing have heard it and liked it — so what else is there?" 

In the time that Warsame has stepped away from the music industry, a lot has changed, from the oversaturation of songs and artists fighting for space, to the shift in strategies to get your music heard. Can you imagine Warsame transforming a snippet of a song into a TikTok-friendly dance routine? Just the thought of something like that feels taxing to him. "I think there's value in what I do, still," he assures, "but I think the effort it takes to gain attention for oneself in the world of music right now is actually much more than I'm willing to give."

Without the full backing power of "the machine," as Warsame describes the collective force that is record labels and high-powered publicity teams, he was still able to release a new single last year titled "Refugee." The song is a beautiful reclamation of the word, which has been weaponized against him and others like him over the years; it feels like a return to form for the rapper who was once told subject matter like this would alienate him from new fans. 

Interestingly, "Refugee" went on to earn Warsame his first-ever Grammy Award last year, taking home the special best song for social change award. It was a proud moment for Warsame, who suddenly found himself back in a room with musical giants like Joni Mitchell and Tracey Chapman, two of his favourite artists of all time. (He described the feeling of seeing both of them perform on Grammy night as "my best fantasy factory.") But a notable difference this time around, he says, is that he actually enjoyed being there without the tensions of his own ego getting in the way. 

"It didn't have any of that old, like, 'What do I mean in this moment? Am I recognized enough?' I'm able to enjoy it now."