The Highlights of Yasiin Bey’s Incredible Career

With all the recent, tragic tales of musicians shuffling off this mortal coil, it’s ironically kind of gratifying to hear about someone’s music career ending due to retirement, rather than, y’know, death. Such is the case with Yasiin Bey. Formerly Mos Def, the Brooklyn rapper/actor/producer/activist announced his retirement from both music and film as part of a longer message which largely pertained to his recent arrest in South Africa, which he maintains was unlawful and unfounded. He moved to South Africa in 2013 on a visitor’s permit, and that having expired, he tried to leave via Cape Town using a ‘World Passport’, a special kind of global citizen passport that tends to pertain to unusual circumstances. They have been accepted by South Africa in the past, but it usually works on a case by case basis.

That’s not really what’s important here, what’s important is that after Bey’s new album drops later this year, if he keeps to his word, we won’t be seeing any more new music from him. The reasoning behind this is a bit ambiguous, but it doesn’t really matter, he’s not the kind of person to make a huge decision like that without a damn good reason. Anyway, I thought this would be an ideal time to recap some of the best moments of Bey’s illustrious 22 year career.

 

Black Star

When Mos Def first came onto the scene, it was as a part of the trio UTD (Urban Thermo Dynamics). They released one album, Manifest Destiny, which is virtually impossible to get ahold of now, but some of the tracks are still on YouTube, including ‘My Kung Fu’, which serves as an early example of how biting Def’s observations were, even at that early stage. In one part of his verse, he talks about his disatisfaction with the direction the rap game was headed in at the time –

“Posin’ with guns, they’re puffin’ mad blunts
Aiyo, brothers just started rhymin’ last month!
They gettin’ fat deals on any major label
when they only seen other people hold the mic cable”

It was in 1997 though, when he and Talib Kweli came together to form Black Star, that things really started moving. Once again, the duo only ever released one full album, but the collaboration remained a loose-knit mainstay throughout both of their careers, and just as well. Mos Def & Talib Kweli are Black Star remains one of the best hip-hop albums ever made. In a time when the industry was being saturated with overproduced gangsta rap, it promoted peace, love and understanding, all marinated in infectious beats produced by Hi-Tek, who went on to work extensively with both of them, and still does in Kweli’s case.

 

Black on Both Sides

After striking out on his own, Def stayed on with Rawkus Records to produce one more album before the label fell apart and he moved on to Geffen. He produced two albums with them: The New Danger and True Magic. Both are fascinating, in their own ways, the former is a bizarre voyage through jazz, soul, funk and rock, and favoured live instrumentation over sampling, while the latter was more of a straight up hip-hop release, with the highlight being ‘Crime and Punishment’, a reworking of GZA’s ‘Liquid Swords’. The album that really demands attention though, and remains his best to date, is the last one he made with Rawkus.

Black on Both Sides suceeded for all the same reasons the Black Star material did, and so many more. The production is outstanding throughout, affecting a kind of relaxed, haunting, punctuating tone that perfectly compliments the bars. This was our proper, proper introduction to Mos Def as a lyricist. He wasn’t trying to appeal or pander to anybody, he was writing, and speaking for himself and damn if he didn’t have some important things to say. The album was wildly well received among critics, but didn’t sell anywhere near enough to keep Rawkus afloat, which is a terrible shame.

 

Def Poetry Jam

As his career progressed, Def started to establish himself on screen. Now, I’m not saying he isn’t a good actor, he most certainly is, but for me his most important work within the realm of TV wasn’t Dexter or NYPD Blue, it was this. HBO’s Def Poetry Jam was a magnificent offshoot of Def Comedy Jam. It followed the same basic formula, but with poems and spoken word performances. Def hosted the series for the entire 5 year run and would periodically perform his own work.

Some of the performers hosted were towering superstars like Kanye, Lauryn Hill, DMX and Dave Chappelle, but also a host of spoken word artists, both established and up-and-coming. It was closely associated with the rise of poetry slams, as many practitioners took the time to appear, like Saul Williams, Big Poppa E and Beau Sia. It was a landmark in that sense, but the way it brought poetry to a new generation of fans through television was its real triumph. While it wasn’t Def’s brainchild, the enthusiasm and heart with which he presented it surely had a lot to do with its success.

 

The Ecstatic

Most characterise the period after the release of True Magic as the biggest slump in Def’s career. The album didn’t go over well with critics, and the initial promises of a more complete version later on never materialised. About a year later, during a show in San Francisco, Def shocked his audience by playing a small clutch of new material, announcing a new album and making some pretty bold promises about the production personnel – Madlib, Kanye and Al Be Back. Two years later The Ecstatic arrived, and although Kanye and Al Be Back were notably absent, the production credits were, to say the least, muscular.

Preservation, Oh No, Mr. Flash and The Neptunes were exciting enough on their own, but one name stood out about and beyond the others: J Dilla. The track, ‘history’ remains the only track on a Mos Def album that the late, great producer ever worked on, and it’s astonishing, as is the rest of the LP. The abstract beats and near-perfect sampling provided the perfect background for Def to take his lyricism to new levels of awareness. At this point, even after a brief period of unease, Mos Def had established himself as the guiding voice of conscious hip-hop.

 

The Guantanamo Bay Demonstration

Once Mos Def had changed his name to Yasiin Bey, his activism, which had always emanated through his lyrics, became all the more prominent. He’d previously co-founded Hip-Hop for Respect, heavily criticised Bush for his failures after Hurricane Katrina and appeared twice on Real Time with Bill Maher, forever proving in the process that compassionate people who dare to appear on talk shows will invariably end up getting bullied and belittled by would-be-but-definitely-aren’t intellectual twat sacks like Bill Bradley and Maher himself.

Anyway, Bey’s most important political statement thankfully wasn’t a shouting match with Christopher Hitchens, it was a harrowing, powerful demonstration of the nightmarish reality of force feeding. In 2013, during Ramadan, many of the Guantanamo inmates were told that they were not allowed to observe the daytime fasting, and that if they didn’t eat, they would be force fed, and so it turned out to be. Thousands spoke out against it, and working Reprieve, a human rights organisation, Bey agreed to undergo the force feeding process himself, exactly as the inmates did, to make it clear just how barbaric it really was.

The results are not easy to watch. The initial intention had obviously been for Bey to do it a few times over, as an inmate would have done, but after the first administration he begs them to stop. As the video explains, the standard procedure usually lasts 2 hours or so. It took a lot of guys to participate in such a demonstration, and the response it received helped fuel the increasing support for the detained hunger strikers. This stands out as a highlight of his career not only because it made a shocking, impossible to ignore statement, but because it’s the kind of thing Bey will likely now continue to do, buoyed by the success of his now complete music career. He’s been an activist through rap, and now, hopefully, he will remain one in himself.