This is the artist fighting to take back what he believes to be his. This is the artist challenging what he believes to be a part of him stolen away. This is a piece that Bey as an artist felt the absolute need to create. Opinions such as these are detrimental in the understanding of the artists’ direction with a track like Rock ‘N’ Roll. Rock ‘N’ Roll has been dubbed ‘overtly black’, ‘racist’, ‘and excessive’. My Great-grandmamma was, from a plantation.Įnough time has elapsed for opinions to be formed of debatably the most important track on this record.
My Grandmamma was raised on a reservation This song, due to delivery, content and production give it an instant advantage in terms of accessibility to this record and whilst as a stand alone piece it works at supreme levels, in the context of the entity as a whole its far more poignant. The way the song is structured using consecutive numbers to build his rhymes never passing the number 10 is indirect proof of this. This really is the last 10 years, summed up by the artist. The latter is an introspective recap of both 90s paranoia and life as a young African living in America. Clever and memorable lyrics are peppered throughout accompanied with impressive and simple sampling of a then forgotten song by Aretha Franklin. The former a narrative in the form of a memoir a playful reenactment of a time in which the narrator met a woman and the events that followed told to what we can assume is an audience of peers. Time has proven these two tracks to be the ambassadors for the album as a whole, which comes as no surprise with hindsight, both songs delivering the exact yin, and yang this album begs and succeeds to deliver. Fat Booty much like DJ Premier (of Gang Starr fame) on the B single Mathematics. Ayatollah deserves equal parts credit for his work on Ms. Sampling as an art form had taken phenomenal strides in the genre by this point. * The notion of a thing being ‘classic’ in this particular sense is rooted in the essence that thing is ‘timeless’.
#MOS DEF THE ECSTATIC CREDITS FULL#
The reason this piece can even be discussed on this level is not in full credit to the artist but to his support base who cultivated his idea as much as Bey did himself. What warrants Black on Both Sides the nomination of the title ‘classic’* is both in part the combination of the artists personal ideology and each producer that were able to meditate along to Bey’s vision and use it as the structure of their own personal creative route to propel it. 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.
#MOS DEF THE ECSTATIC CREDITS SERIES#
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. Review Summary: For all of my peoples, negroes and latinos…and even the gringos
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