Too black, too white, too bad: Ethiopian rocker Kenna Zemedkun
Kenna Zemedkun has advantages that would have other unknown region singers gnawing their Converse sneakers with envy. The album he's around to release, Make Sure enough They Watch My Face, was co-produced by his famous senior high friend, Chad Victor Hugo of the Neptunes, his fans include bigwigs such as U2's coach, Alice Paul McGuinness, and MTV2 played one of his early videos 475 times, at viewers' request. Added to that, he's got articulacy, looks and an addictive 80s-meets-00s electro-rockiness that he modestly describes as "timeless just push boundaries". And he featured on Crisscross Ronson's Rendering album, singing the song Amy. He's exactly the form of credible-but-commercial proposition that should sell itself. So wherefore does his record party view the job of break him as a major challenge?
The answer reveals itself in a comment lately posted on YouTube by person called Killahfam69, wHO watched the video for his freshly single, Suppose Good-bye to Love. Killahfam69 was disdainful: "I simply thought he was white River. I am a black guy, and not many black people like this music." There's the problem: Kenna confuses people. Apparently, he's as well black for white audiences, non black enough for black ones.He encountered the saame mental attitude in 2003, when he released his debut album, New Sacred Cow, too produced by Hugo. Despite the Neptunes connection, it was too genre-defying to get airplay on American wireless - neither urban nor rock stations of the Cross would read a punt on it - and it flopped. Five age afterwards, he's still unclassifiable.An Ethiopian whose parents emigrated to Virginia when he was ternion, he's run up against the saame brick wall since he started committal to writing songs in his late teens. Despite growth up in a city where hip-hop poured from every room access, he was unmoved by music till a neighbor gave him a tape of U2's The Josue Tree and told him to pick out it home and listen to it. He was wowed, and since that day, his heart has lain in a in particular crunchy strand of synth-rock, which complements his coiled, yearning voice. It's the strait, he says, of "keep between two worlds".Only what makes Kenna genuinely bandstand come out of the closet in his non precisely crowded champaign is that he's the merely aspiring musician who's been the national of a chapter in a best-selling sociological tome. When Canadian River journalist Malcolm Gladwell was committal to writing the review to his highly influential 2000 essay on trends, The Tipping Point, he decided that Kenna's state of affairs illustrated the premise of the new book Nictitate, which studied the essence of using catgut instinct to make decisions. Gladwell reckoned that Kenna was a great exercise: he was loved by major players such as McGuinness, but tuner programmers and the Killahfam69s of the world just didn't have him - so whose catgut was "right"? The chapter headed Kenna's Dilemma tried to answer the question. (Its conclusion was that the programmers and haters had been unnerved by Kenna's unique stylus into fashioning the "wrong" elasticity decision.)I asked Gladwell to anticipate whether he'd be punter received in United Kingdom, with its more liberalist prospect of cross-genre music. "Single of Kenna's great frustrations in the United States, as I argued in Nictitate, was that his music can't be well pigeon-holed," he replied, via email. "He doesn't conform to easy into existing categories, and in a popular music cultivation that is as segregated and traditional as U.S.A. is, that's a job. I don't intend segregated racially, but culturally. You will never hear Wilco and Jay-Z on the lapp station even though oodles of people listen to both Wilco and Jay-Z (like me). Just my sense of England is that those strict boundaries betwixt genres don't matter closely as much. That makes me think Kenna's music is far less problematic to the musical community of interests over thither than hither."Kenna is hoping he's properly. "I tend to be the person world Health Organization never realised music has a colour. My music doesn't lend itself to organism identified with i race or acculturation," he says. "There's an Aesop cite: work force oft spat the imitation and whoosh at the real number thing."
