Backspin: Black Star — Mos Def & Talib Kweli are Black Star (1998)
With hip-hop reaching new heights, Mos Def and Talib Kweli took it back to its essence. (85/100)
September 29, 1998 is as close to an official changing of the guard as hip-hop has seen.
On that faithful fall day, A Tribe Called Quest released their final album (until their 2016 reunion), The Love Movement, symbolizing an official end to the era of cerebral, jazz inflected hip-hop of which Tribe had been the standard bearer for nearly a decade.
Mere feet over, record store shelves were being stocked to the gills with Jay-Z’s Vol. 2… Hard Knock Life, the album that would quickly emerge as the blueprint for the east coast iteration of the “bling” era. With it, pristine digital production and a hustler’s prosperity gospel would replace the organic beats and everyman rhymes of Tribe and their brethren.
Rounding out the day’s trifecta of superstar releases was Outkast’s iconoclastic masterpiece, Aquemini, which signaled that hip-hop’s vanguard of groundbreaking creativity, grown stagnant up north, had found sustenance in the south.
Against that backdrop, the understated 9/29 arrival of Mos Def & Talib Kweli are Black Star felt like salvation to a particular subset of…
