Kenna: Urban music goes to outer space

Interview, April, 2002 by Matt Diehl

While Kenna hails from the same Virginia Beach 'hood that produced visionary hip-hop icons the Neptunes, he's no rapper. Instead of beats and rhymes, New Sacred Cow--recently released on Limp Bizkit front man Fred Durst's Flawless label and co-produced by Neptune Chad Hugo--oozes irresistible '80s synth-pop atmospheres and unbridled emotion that'll have you crying Tears For Fears. "The Cars, Depeche Mode--that's what I grew up on," Kenna explains.

Having moved to the United States at the age of three, speaking no English, with a father who is a former Ethiopian Minister of Agriculture and a mother who studied at a policy institute with Jerry Springer, Kenna is used to standing out. "An Ethiopian by way of Virginia making new wave, hip-hop, black Beatlesesque music--what the hell?" he exclaims. "I deal with mad influences all at once; disseminating which piece of culture to make my own makes me happily dysfunctional. I call my music 'free-base' because there's no basis-for it. I had to make my own genre, my own world--it's a mixture. Last time I checked, music didn't have a color."

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There's a new movement afoot in the hip-hop/R&B universe: future funk. It's music that goes black to the future. Like Kenna, it borrows from unlikely sources like alternative and electronica to heighten its sci-fi vibe, without ever losing sight of the groove.

If one act was the sun in this constellation, it would be Outkast, the freak Atlanta rhyme visionaries who've touched everyone with their rays of light. The Earth, however, would be producer/artist superstars the Neptunes, because all music these days seems to be rooted in the fertile soil of their influential intergalactic beats. The Neptunes' protegee Kelis is the moon in this constellation. Her latest, Wanderland, glows like a psychedelic maze of sounds and styles, sometimes in one song.

De La Soul and Q-Tip, meanwhile, make up Saturn and its rings because they've been running rings around less innovative artists since they appeared in the late '80s. On their latest releases, De La's AOI: Bionix and Q-Tip's Kamaal the Abstract, they continue to radically rewrite the rap rulebook. New artist Res is the Pluto of the bunch, giving the neo-soul chanteuse persona a software update on her debut How I Do, exchanging '70s black-power poetics for trip-hop atmosphere. And if there's a Mars in the future funk squad, it's the U.K.'s Roots Manuva, whose interplanetary rhymes and spacey dub stylings make clear that British hip-hop isn't an oxymoron. Taken together, this stellar group proves that urban music isn't just on an innovative streak. It's out of this world.

Matt Diehl is a freelance writer living in New York.