Dante "Mos Def" Smith walks the walk and talks the talk -- literally. This past May, he led me on a four-hour interview ramble around Manhattan's SoHo and West Village, stopping into bodegas and smoke shops, greeting fans, giving hugs and pounds, posing for cell phone photos, like the hip-hop ambassador of some conscious-rap dream sequence.
But the Brooklyn-born MC, 35, is a knottier figure than such hail-fellow appearances imply. He's a Broadway and Hollywood actor of subtly complex gifts (Topdog/Underdog, The Woodsman, Something the Lord Made); a fearless, if egocentric, tester of musical boundaries, often to the detriment of his own career (2004's dodgy rap-rock hybrid The New Danger, 2006's patchy contract-breaker True Magic); a pesky political provocateur; and a glib propagator of conspiracies and legends (yes on Bigfoot, no on the moon landings!).
He's also just recorded the best hip-hop album of 2009 thus far -- The Ecstatic, featuring kinetic, panoramic, global-pop production from Madlib, Oh No, Georgia Anne Muldrow, and French electro maven Mr. Flash. Whether rapping en español, airlifting Slick Rick's "Children's Story" into the Iraq War, or toasting a J Dilla beat with Black Star comrade Talib Kweli, Mos Def spits a call to prayer and party and bullshit with a fiery commitment unheard since Black on Both Sides, his late-'90s solo debut.
The Ecstatic's first single, "Life in Marvelous Times," might be the most powerful and accessible song you've ever recorded -- from storytelling to production -- yet it's not even being played on local New York radio.
If "Life in Marvelous Times" can't get on the radio, then I don't need to be on the radio.
That's how I feel. It's over now. The radio is all around you anyway. The radio is everywhere and everybody [points at passersby], so let's get the vibration going out. I'm very patient. People will hear it, although I know it's hard for them to ignore all this shit that's up in their faces. I mean, seriously, The Hills? No dis, but I mean -- okay, fuck it, dis. Stop already. Why is anybody supposed to care?
"Life in Marvelous Times" goes back to when you were a little kid, nine years old, 1982.
That was the first year I wrote a rhyme, and it was also the year that I first saw Wild Style -- in the theater, in the Bronx, with my moms. The place was packed. I lived for a summer in the Bronx, and you can’t really describe that time and the energy and have it mean all that it did. It falls short. New York was another type of place, and hip-hop was local, community music, public-access channel. It was a culture that came up in a city on the decline.
Didn't you start acting when you were really young?
I was in my first play, Free to Be...You and Me, about the same time, when I was in fifth grade. I just caught the bug, and the magnet schools around my way had talent programs, and my mother was keen on getting me into them. And Philippa Schuyler, my middle school, was this place, this oasis, in Brooklyn, in Bushwick, in the hood, but there were all these bright, talented kids. It was like the Huxtables years before The Cosby Show.
You're the eldest of 12 children and stepchildren -- how long were the kids still coming after you were born?
From '75 to '97. We didn't live together in the same house, but we were all close. And, yeah, we was working-class poor people. I never wanted for basics; we always had a place to stay, and my family's a great family. But as you get older, you're like, "Wait, this is not how the rest of the world is living." Then, in the '80s, [the television show] Dynasty came on, and we were like, "This is really not how the rest of the world is living. We are fucked-up over here. We're broker than a motherfucker compared to this Dynasty shit."
You grew up in a housing project in Bedford-Stuyvesant, the Roosevelt Houses. How much of an impact did that have?
I remember just spending hours looking out my window at the grass, this little fake-ass lawn you got. Sometimes, I'll have recurring dreams about the projects, just staring out that window. I believe the projects were a social experiment; we were laboratory rats stacked on top of each other, and people just knew, inherently, that there was something wrong. There's not a lot of regard for the property by the residents. Everything about it is just priming you to be institutionalized as an adult -- the colors on the walls, the acoustics. My window didn't even open up; you had to pull and push it out sideways to get some bullshit circular air going.
As a kid, did you question why you were living there?
Very early, I was like, we're here because we don't have any money. The racial aspect hadn't even crossed my mind. I remember being seven years old and looking out that window, thinking, "I'm gonna make some money." Because we were good people. It'd be different if we were creeps. But even creeps deserve to live someplace halfway decent.
By the time you got to high school, it was the full-on crack era.
When crack hit, you had people who couldn't ordinarily afford cocaine now getting some for the same price they could get a nickel or a dime bag of weed, and it was just over. It was a wrap. You had 15- to 16-year-olds with $200,000 in their closets from hustling. Then you had dudes who wasn't selling dope trying to get money from the dudes who was. If you have hundreds of thousands of dollars in that situation, you’re not going to take it to Chemical Bank. And if somebody takes it from you, you are not calling the police. You just got got.
With so many people buying dope, and so much money to be made selling it, you get mass craziness.
It was a lot of violence, and it was all young folks. You'd be at the bus stop and 30 dudes would run up and just beat the shit out of the whole bus stop, and then get on the bus and beat the shit out of the whole bus, including the bus driver. So you're walking around in a state of constant stress. It was a wild time, man, and nobody cared. City didn't care, government didn't care. The Decepticons [a Brooklyn gang] were running around here with hammers. They'd show up at your school at 8:30 in the morning, you're waiting to get in, and they'd fuck the whole school up -- you, the security guards, your moms, whatever. There was no regard; school was dangerous.
Is that part of why you dropped out of high school? Or was it also that you were already booking acting jobs?
Read the answer to this question and many more in the August 2009 issue of SPIN, on newsstands now.
