“Mos Def & Talib Kweli are Black Star” by Black Star
An essential document from hip-hop's late-90s underground scene.
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Welcome to a new edition of the Daily Music Picks newsletter!
Today’s music pick is an essential document from hip-hop’s conscious underground, sounding as fresh as ever 25 years on.
Genre: Alternative Hip-Hop, Conscious Hip-Hop
Label: EMI
Release Date: September 29, 1998
Vibe: 🔥🔥🔥
When it was first released in the late-90s, Mos Def & Talib Kweli are Black Star brought rap music back to its roots while simultaneously rejecting the genre’s most commercially appealing conventions, namely the Bad Boy-era, shiny-suit braggadocio. Instead, this record is more akin to hip-hop’s early days, sharpening seriously poetic lyricism into short verses that leave plenty of room for the duo to pull off Run-DMC-style interplay. What we’re left with more than two decades later is an album that sounds as timeless and profound as ever. Like a crisp white tee and distressed blue jeans, the bass-heavy boom-bap production and virtuoso scratching never go out of style, nor does the quietly confident bar-spitting by two of the most criminally underrated emcees alive.
The most eye-opening part of Black Star today is how relevant the themes, often pointed, philosophical critiques of hip-hop’s widely accepted ethos, remain. There are meditations on “blackness” and the loaded connotations that term still carries (”Astronomy (8th Light)”), how to replace confrontation with conversation (”K.O.S. (Determination)”), the often-suffocating demands of living in the Big Apple (”Respiration”), and, most importantly, how rap’s reliance on and glorification of violent themes are still tearing it apart from the inside out. On “Definition,” the record’s most aggressive track lyrically, Kweli states, “Consider me the entity within the industry/Without a history of spittin' the epitome of stupidity/Livin' my life, expressin' my liberty, it gotta be done properly/My name is in the middle of equality.” Not simply a dazzling piece of songwriting, but also a reminder of rap’s power to educate and integrate, instead of intimidate and separate—a lesson many labels and industry execs have yet to take to heart.
If there’s any conscious rap record that deserves a spot in your collection, it’s this one.
👉 Don’t forget to click the album image to stream the album on your favorite platform 👈