Liberian-American spoken word artist is home at last

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“This is a year of completion for me,” e.g. bailey says in the office of Trú Rúts Endeavors, the multidisciplinary arts organization that he runs with his wife, Sha Cage. His struggle to fit in America is not unlike that of many African immigrants. He attributes his success as an award-winning multidisciplinary artist and producer to this struggle of finding a home away from home. bailey who was born in Saclepea, Liberia, is the son of a white Peace Corps volunteer and a Liberian mother. His father, bailey says, “threw a dart, hit Liberia, and that’s where he got stationed.” Continue Reading

AutoTune and automatic weapons: K’naan, top Somali MC, coming to the Varsity

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This Wednesday night marks the return of the quickly-rising Somali MC K’naan to Minneapolis. After closing the Pan-African Festival last summer, he is coming to the Varsity Theater in support of his new album, Troubadour.K’naan’s performance here has more significance than most of his tour stops, given the large number of Somalis living in Minnesota. K’naan himself used to live in Minneapolis, and at the Varsity you can expect an enthusiastic crowd waving Somali flags. K’naan is one of the few Somali MCs to achieve the adoration of Somalis under 30 as well as the respect of older members of the community, those most often suspicious of rap’s effects on young Somalis.Like many of the diasporic, refugee, and immigrant artists who draw on their experiences as fodder for their art, K’naan tells the story of his own journey but raps about a wide range of subjects—he’s a Somali MC, but he can’t be pigeonholed as only a Somali MC. There are references to Somalia on nearly every song on Troubadour. Continue Reading

“Project, Project”: Wall-to-wall multimedia stimulation

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On Saturday, the Kitty Cat Klub will be the site of the inaugural Project, Project, an immersive, multi-sensory aesthetic experience featuring work from nearly every part of the artistic spectrum. The idea for Project, Project came from the minds of two Minneapolis groups, Nobot and Estate, who are quickly gaining notoriety in electronic music circles in both Minnesota and beyond. The groups’ members—Nobot’s Kyle Vande Slunt and Adam Tucker, and Estate’s Dan Kramer and Josh Johnson—have worked closely together for nearly two years, performing together throughout the region and even remixing each other’s songs. “This is the next step in our collaboration,” Vande Slunt told me while sitting at the Kitty Cat Klub last week as Estate performed a DJ set. Project, Project attempts to merge normally disparate artistic happenings into a single, all-encompassing event. Continue Reading

Interview: The Nancy Drew Crew, feminists and activists on the mic

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The Nancy Drew Crew are not your typical hip-hop group, even for a community like the Twin Cities that’s not exactly your typical hip-hop scene. Coming from a queer-feminist activist background, the group’s two MCs—MC Smells and MC Mayhem—rap about, among other things, deodorant, DIY arts and crafts, and the inequities of college education on their debut EP, The Case is Closed. I sat down at Hard Times with the two MCs, along with their DJ and producer Skullbuster, fresh off their first West Coast tour, hoping to find out a little more about the group that City Pages recently called, endearingly, “the Shaggs of hip-hop.”
When did the Nancy Drew Crew start?MC Smells: Well, last April, the Women’s Student Activist Collective was putting on a hip-hop show. There was an open call for artists, and Anna and I had sort of jokingly wrote this deodorant song together [“Deodorant Conspiracy”]. I knew that Skullbuster made beats, and I was like, “You should give us a CD that we can rap over for this thing.” Our first show with Brian was in September, at the Pocketknife. Continue Reading