It's the era of hip hop for people who don't like hip hop. From Outkast to k-os, genre-hopping artists on both sides of the border have reached well beyond rap's loyal fan base, turning up on mainstream rock stations and becoming household names among people more likely to have the Foo Fighters than 50 Cent loaded on to their MP3 players.

Now, there's K'naan - still with a more modest following, but winning over converts all the same.

"A lot of the comments that I get on the road are, 'I've never listened to hip hop, but I love what you do," the Toronto-based rapper says, looking back on recent Canadian gigs that have taken him from Live 8 in Barrie to the Calgary Folk Festival, and plenty of places in between. "I even had one guy come up to me after a show and say he only listens to punk rock, and all the live acts he's seen are punk-rock acts, and that among all of them I was his favourite performer. So that's the kind of connection it's getting."

Such connections are usually built by fusing enough sounds and styles to appeal to a broad range of tastes. And both K'naan's debut album, The Dusty Foot Philosopher, and his live act benefit from eclectic arrangements - including African drums, hand claps and sing-alongs - which infuse his act with a rootsy flavour that sets it apart from more standard fare. But for the 28-year-old rapper fast becoming Canada's most famous Somalian refugee, his burgeoning success has as much to do with what he's saying as how he's saying it.

In the endless quest for stories we haven't heard before - a normally fruitless search in most genres, not just rap - K'naan is a breath of fresh air. A decade-and-a-half removed from a terrifying childhood in war-torn Mogadishu, watching friends and family get shot and learning to fire a gun long before he hit adolescence, he's serving as a poetic spokesman for a land that doesn't have many voices on this side of the globe. Meanwhile, he's giving us a window into his efforts to come to terms with it all - contending with emotions that range from blazing anger and solemn despair to fierce pride and tentative optimism, often all in the same song.

"I have every emotion humanly possible about things," he says. "There's real strong anger that is in my personality about ... the nature of past and my experiences. My optimism - all of it is very much a part of me."

What's also a part of him, he acknowledges, is general irritation at a rap industry characterized by shallow fronting by "jerking off punks," as he calls them on the furious If Rap Gets Jealous. If critics are looking for a bone to pick with The Dusty Foot Philosopher, it might be whether K'naan - whose vocals often sound oddly like Eminem's - doesn't play hip hop's familiar game of one-upmanship, wearing his background in blood-stained Mogadishu to prove superior street cred on tracks like What's Hardcore?, which has him proclaiming that "if I rhymed about home and got descriptive, I'd make 50 Cent look like Limp Bizkit."

While insisting he has no intention of "discrediting anyone's experiences," K'naan acknowledges a certain impatience with American rappers' tales of urban violence.

"There are some artists that I think are ridiculous when they speak it," he says. "Kids I grew up with have the same feelings about it. When we came to North America, we would listen to these rap records and just kinda smile at each other, and be like, 'aw, c'mon, man.' Because for us ... imagine someone complaining about how rough it is because it's normal for them to hear gunshots in their neighbourhoods. And most of the kids I hung out with are talking about, 'Well, I've been shot. My parents are killed.' The tragedy level is so different."

It's not his intention, he insists, to glorify his own experiences; quite the contrary. "We can kind of see a certain exploitative aspect of [North American rap], which terrifies you when you're from my sort of background," he says. "To see anyone ever using it to their leverage is a problem.

"Our struggle is not something to be displayed as 'Hey, look at us, we're tougher,' or something like that. I like to present it as a matter of survival, rather than a matter of boasting."

It's an approach that might give voice to another under-represented experience - that of the refugee trying to find his way in North American ghettos, as K'naan has for the past 14 years in Harlem and in Toronto's Rexdale and Dixon neighbourhoods.

"It's been both tragic and beautiful as well, the last 14 years," he says. "I've dealt with everything from being in prison to having my friends killed or deported. If I had 10 friends growing up together, maybe four have been doing over 10-year sentences.

"For the first half of my life, there was no such thing as racism. And then suddenly it was the most impactful thing. And that sort of brutal violence that happens in your emotional growth - it takes a lot out of you. That's what I often reflect on: Was it better to hide from bullets raining, or has it been more hurtful to duck from words that are aimed at you?"

It's a question he might opt to tackle down the road. But for now, K'naan isn't done looking back at the land he left behind.

"It's possible that I'll write more about my experiences here," he says. "But believe me, the 14 I had there were impactful enough for me to make records about it all my life."