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Mos Def
Black On Both Sides
A high level of knowledge of self (determination) is rarely achieved by a hip-hop generation too scared to risk its industry trust funds or too myopic to see beyond mere rhetoric; nonetheless, some have broken though. Mos Def is one such visionary----an MC whose devotion to hip-hop and passion for social consciousness combine with a synergy seldom witnessed in rap history. Of course, it makes sense that Mos Def would be a child of hip-hop's Golden Era of superhero MCs (Rakim, Big Daddy Kane) and new school leaders (De La Soul, Jungle Brothers). A native Brooklinyte who spent his childhood in neighborhoods like Bedford Stuyesant and East Flatbush, Mos Def grew up in a time where "most of the people who were fans (of hip-hop) were also active fans in the culture in some way. In '88, you'd have kids watching Video Music Box in their living room, working out dance routines." But Mos not only digested all the hip-hop influences around him, he also absorbed knowledge from across the artistic spectrum; be it the jazz meditations of Ahmad Jamal, the pop lyricism of Steely Dan, the evocative prose of Chinua Achebe or the cross-cultural humor of Danny Hoch. Says Mos: "I"m just inspired not just by black art, but good art, representations of art that are sincere and genuine." Encouraged by his younger brother (Medina Green's DCQ), Mos Def first graced a record with UTD's "My Kung Fu" in 1994. With his signature nasal flow and playful scatting, Mos was clearly a talent to watch, and despite UTD's all-too-brief existence, Mos would go on to make indelible cameo appearances on songs like the Bush Babee's "Love Song" and De La Soul's "Big Brother Beat." The discriminating rap connoisseur could detect in Mos Def a range of talent that is tremendous; he had the good-natured charisma to appeal to a crossover audience but also the deft, clever rhyme skills so treasured in the underground. At Rawkus Records, Mos found a label willing to play fair. The result was the instant underground classic "Universal Magnetic" in 1996, a single whose jazz-nuances, self-propelling, wicked beat (courtesy Shawn J. Period) and endless fountain of rhymes would catapult Mos as an underground favorite. That same year would also see Mos' soon-to-be legendary collaboration with Talib Kweli on Reflection Eternal's "Fortified Live," another seminal single in Rawkus history. Mos and Talib found brothers of the same mind in one another, omniscient community activists who saw the larger picture of hip-hop's influence within America and the world. With Rawkus' full blessing, the two formed Black Star, whose debut, Mos Def and Talib Kweli Are...Black Star, would become on of the 1998's most important hip-hop albums. In 1999, a scant three months until the vaunted end of the millennium, Mos Def was finally ready to present his first solo album, a multi-dimensional portrait of an MC embodying the best of hip-hop's past and one of its brightest hopes for the future. Titled Black On Both Sides, the RIAA-certified Gold album speaks to Mos' firm anchor in the lived experience of quotidian life as a black person. Mos explains: "So often, artists like myself or Kweli are referred to as alternative or conscious. To me, that's like another code word to diminish your attachments to the community, to black people. You sort of like this foreign, distant element that people may admire from a distance but they don't have any real closeness to, it's not intimate to them, it's not of them." While Mos Def is at the center of the album's creative nova, the LP is also a collaborative project with everybody from torch singer Vinia Mojica to Ummah's Ali Shaheed Muhammed, to jazz legend Weldon Irvine. The only criteria for inclusion according to Mos was that "everybody was really forward thinking and trying to expand the dimensions on what people's ideas of hip-hop is and what people's idea of what a hip-hop artist is." The lead single is "Speed Law", which Mos describes as "some straight up hip-hop where I try to use very sturdy, almost industrial-strength language in it, yet be poetic about it." To his home borough of Brooklyn, Mos pens "Habitat," one of the greatest odes to the borough since Gang Starr's "The Planet Where We Dwell." As a born-and-bred Brooklyn Bomber, Mos takes no shorts about his "hood. "I was born here. My daughters were born a few blocks away. My mother was born here, my grandmother lived here for 40 years. I am a native. I am Brooklyn. This is my town. You're the visitor." Perhaps one of the album's most striking songs is the simply titled "Hip Hop," a short but powerful reflection on rap music's complex culture and industry. "It"s just my take on hip-hop in a historical sense, from a global perspective," says Mos. Unquestionably, the most breathtaking song on the album is "Umi Says," a song that praises Mos biggest creative impetus, his mother, and lays a manifesto for all men black and white to follow like the Bible. The big club beat boogie comes to us in the form of "Miss Fat Booty," a ghetto love story/tragedy in which Mos flexes exceptional Slick Rick-like storytelling ability and narrates an unfortunate tale of romance and brutal candidness of sexuality. "Mathematics" proves itself an intensely clever song on the numbers and statistics affiliated with scores of data that seem to cast clouds on the plains of society. Mos Def has the understanding of a deep wisdom frightening to consider...that hip-hop, for all its beauty and power, still can't redeem your humanity. Ultimately, transcendence and transformation is left up to you, and while Black on Both Sides is created to inspire people with its vast imagination and ambitions, Mos Def puts it down: "The revolution is personal ... I'm not doing this for public acclaim. I'm doing this because it's sincere to me, it's real to me."
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