music. He scraped together some money to rent a studio. He
recorded a demo. His songs were different — not weird,
exactly, but different. They were hard to classify. Sometimes
people want to put Kenna in the rhythm-and-blues category,
which irritates him because he thinks people do that just
because he’s black. If you look at some of the Internet servers
that store songs, you can sometimes find his music in the
alternative section and sometimes in the electronica section and
sometimes in the unclassified section. One enterprising rock
critic has tried to solve the problem simply by calling his music
a cross between the British new wave music of the 1980s and
hip-hop.
How to classify Kenna is a difficult question, but, at least in
the beginning, it wasn’t one that he thought about a great deal.
Through a friend from high school, he was lucky enough to get
to know some people in the music business. “In my life,
everything seems to fall in place,” Kenna says. His songs landed
in the hands of a so-called A and R man — a talent scout for a
record company — and through that contact, his demo CD
landed in the hands of Craig Kallman, the co-president of
Atlantic Records. That was a lucky break. Kallman is a self-
described music junkie with a personal collection of two