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Every ounce of brilliance (The level of brilliance is subject to debate however the acceptance that brilliance is apparent is universal) that Bey provides on this record stems from his skills as a writer. Yasiin Bey’s artistry lies in his lyrics. Taking what he’d learned from Black Star, Bey returned to his once benched debut, Black On Both Sides. It’s less about Yasiin and Talib and more about two good Samaritans whom at the time thought they had a duty to their people of the past, the present and the future. Black Star as a movement is personal, it’s a quest for peace in hip-hop, it’s a rally to bring perspective to a young black audience, then caught up in the danger and excitement of living vicariously through these two supreme figures of east and west. In perhaps the most crucial time in the genre, they pioneered to shift the attention back to what this art form could cultivate. They finally had the hiccup to make their voices heard. In the wake of Christopher Wallace’s death, the two dropped their then ongoing projects to take the power back.

There would be no Black Star without the East/West rivalry, these two young black poets had reached boiling point. It opposes the very foundations on which it’s built.
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The Black Star movement is interesting on a series of levels. To truly understand Black on Both Sides in the way it is intended one must first realize Mos Def’s (I will from here on refer to the artist as Yasiin Bey, his chosen name) initial success in Black Star. The movie’s okay, nothing more, and leans way more into sentimentality versus the comedy gold it should have pursued, unfortunately.Review Summary: For all of my peoples, negroes and latinos…and even the gringos The premise of Be Kind, Rewind is so great and so exciting that I still get fired up thinking about it to this day: two knucklehead guys working at a video store (Mos Def and Black), due to Plot Reasons, are forced to “re-create” ultra low budget versions of film classics in super short order.
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I particularly associate Mos Def the actor with a movie called Be Kind, Rewind, in which he co-stars with Jack Black (another dynamic actor with his own outstanding musical career as one half of the comedy folk-metal duo known as Tenacious D).

Mos Def also had quite a run as an actor during the 2000s, with standout roles in movies such as The Italian Job, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Woodsman, and six episodes of Chappelle’s Show. And being genuinely funny never hurts as well. Oh yeah, and like all great storytellers, Mos Def never strays away from understanding that the most important thing is to be entertaining. I’ve simply never heard anything like it. I’m delighted by how Mos Def can adeptly can shift from an ultra-casual mode, as though he’s telling a great story to his friends, before zooming into an incredibly smooth and high-speed hip-hop flow at will.Īnd then I can never get over how he’ll super off-handedly announce that a new part of the story has begun by dropping in a “scene two” or “scene three” to orient the listener in the story. In a tight sub-four minutes, we get a full-on story of young love out on the scene.
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I’m listening to it as I write these words, and I’m still blown away by how good it is: how it works as pure musical experience, as a display of Mos Def’s hip hop mastery, as a college course on How to Sample Better Than Everyone (namely, by using Aretha Franklin’s “One Step Ahead”), and perhaps most of all as a narrative masterpiece. Fat Booty,” and it’s become one of all time favorite hip hop songs ever since.

And by seriously, I became flat out obsessed with “Ms. So why is Mos Def’s Black on Both Sides on this best 1,000 albums ever thing?īlack on Both Sides was released in 1999, and I have vague memories of… acquiring songs from the album via Napster or one of the early peer-to-peer music platforms way back in the day.Īround a decade ago, though, I began taking the album far more seriously.
