HOME FEATURES COLUMNS FILM LIT MUSIC BLOG CONTACT		MOS DEF & TALIB KWELI ARE :: BLACK STAR FOLLOW ME HOME (taken from Classic Material) By Hua Hsu University of California at Berkeley, Fall 1998: The world was ready to change. In California, a voter initiative had just stricken affirmative action the year before and as bright-eyed young student-activists sensing a change in the political currents, we were digging in for the struggle to preserve all the things we (still) believed in: ethnic studies, prison reform, bilingual education, etc. We were going to tear this mothersucker down, make history but be a part of it too. But then everyone thinks that when they're freshly twenty. In retrospect it was all somewhat of an illusion and we weren't actually standing on the cusp of anything unique or grand. We were college kids with smooth hands. We were horny for revolution just like every class before us, and like those classes before us, some of us graduated and went onto become lawyers and some of us graduated and became labor organizers. The important fact in all of this is that, regardless of what happened afterwards, the experience of those moments-shouting slogans, marching, arguing with passers-by-taught you something: about yourself, about the traditions of progressive struggle and about the importance of maintaining faith in an unbelieving culture. We were too young to be cynical, too idealistic to feel old. It was perfect, and at the same time, so was Mos Def and Talib Kweli are Black Star. This wasn't protest music; they were songs of love and devotion for a generation that had lost its way and caught on with the wrong swagger. At the time-and trust me, it does seem like it was many hip-hop lifetimes ago-Black Star was like the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Panthers and the Native Tongues rolled into one; it was the hopes and contradictions of 20th-century life angled into multipurpose verse. Kweli was blessed with a subtlety of approach and punchy, breathy anxiety while Mos' childishly smooth voice and man-sized vision boomed with a weathered authority that betrayed his age. Their appearances on various Rawkus 12-inches positioned them at the vanguard, and their debut was supposed to be the poem, manifesto, slogan, anthem-the everything-of a generation. The thing is, Mos Def & Talib Kweli Are Black Star really isn't a phenomenal album. For all its wonder and imagery-and you didn't have to be a dumb college kid to get this; it just seemed special at the time-the album is inconsistent and a little half-assed, never really finding the strut you expect. But it was filled with promise and it inspired belief, if not hope. Every generation gets that swell at some point-that need to represent and do good-but not every generation has a Mos Def and Talib Kweli. Black Star was an ambitious album that arrived in the midst of hip-hop's late-1990s restructuring. The independent revolution proved to be unsuccessful as class, race, economy and ambition fractured TheUnderground into a philosophy built on rejection and reaction. Aboveground producers like Mannie Fresh, Timbaland and the Neptunes-as well as Dr. Dre and Eminem-started bringing interesting sounds to the radio, but progress-moral, not just material-seemed irrelevant. Through all of this, Mos Def and Kweli didn't shy away from the grand, great questions-what hip-hop and was what it should be. It was love, theft, an old copy of The Bluest Eye and a hand-me-down understanding of Marcus Garvey's grand design for repatriation to Africa in the early-1920s. Like Garvey, the man who christened his fleet the Black Star Liners, the ambition alone of Mos and Kweli's project counts for something. The album suggested deliverance and salvation not just for black folk, but for city-dwellers, art cats, passionate souls and human beings everywhere. As hip-hop got more and more micro, here they came with the universalism of love and experience. The thrust of Black Star is summarized by Kweli on "K.O.S. (Determination)": "The most important time in history is NOW." It's a directive. It's an order to go out in the world and make better, to scribble down exactly who we be at this precise moment. The idealistic "Definition" and "RE:DEFinition" converged hip-hop's past-Boogie Down Productions' "P is Free" beat, the twin legacies of the late 2Pac and Biggie-into the vast, open space of the present-our present. "Brown Skin Woman" was a love song to the ideal of love; a rare beauty of a song about the innocence, bliss and hokey-ness of first flames and stardust. "Respiration" sat you right next to Mos, Kweli and guest Common on trains and stoops, taking in the jerky skylines anew with young, wide eyes. The album's poetic masterpiece was the stunning "Thieves in the Night," with lyrics about the narrow gaze of youth and the hard knocks of coming-of-age that were cribbed straight from Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. Despite several gaffes-most notably their choice to end the album with the punchless "Twice Inna Lifetime"-Black Star was still a great record with moments of pure, untouched idealism and, importantly, a want of vision. Change would come, and though it was natural, it wasn't what you would have expected (or hoped for) at the time. By the time they did their solo albums in the following years, Mos and Kweli seemed a little jaded and weary of their overtly conscious stances. Though they would each release solo albums-Mos' Black on Both Sides and Kweli and producer Hi-Tek's collaborative Reflection Eternal-that were actually better than Black Star, they would never recapture the naively free vastness-the moment-of that first record. It was probably for the better. As hip-hop's turf wars and success confused even its staunchest disciples, Mos used his solo debut to warn that hip-hop, whatever it may be, will never save you. But, after youthful idealism surrendered to the control and pressures of maturity, was hip-hop itself still worth saving for them, for these self-christened "universal magnetic B-Boys?" Even once the big questions were tabled for us kids and the exuberance lost, the idea of those anxious, angsty fights still gives strength. In practice we fell short, just as Black Star does, but we learned the most important lesson of them all: greatness is a means, not an end, and sometimes it pays to simply have the guts to think big. We'll get there eventually.