Def takes the listener on a tour of all the stupid things you shouldn’t do at night in the City. Following Busta’s cameo, Mos flows into “Got,” which is a lesson on how to not get robbed in New York (avoid: “ High Posting when you’re far from home, or High Posting when you’re all alone.“) Mr. The team-up with Busta Rhymes is charismatic and punctuates Mos Def’s fluid lyrical delivery well. It’s uncharacteristic on this album in its posturing, but it’s catchy as hell. While the content of the lyrics aren’t the most thought-provoking, the Mos / Busta team-up is energetic and hypnotic. “Do It Now,” with Busta Rhymes, is by far one of the catchiest tracks on the record. When the album is over you feel like you’ve had Mos over as a guest for a week and have engaged in all the late night drunken debates on modern life that you would expect from any true friend. The album launches from here into a trip around Mos’ observations on love, Brooklyn, the origins of rock music, relationships, getting robbed, racism, and just about anything and everything. Mos Def’s strengths, dynamic and engaging beats, intelligent lyrics and creative flow, come together to craft this statement on hip-hop culture and the hip-hop music industry. It’s a meta-hip hop track a hip-hop track about hip-hop. The album’s second track, “Hip Hop,” is the real opener, a genre track, much in the vein of “Rock and Roll All Night,” by Kiss. It’s a four-and-a-half minute song with a three-minute intro if your song has three minutes of introduction, your name should be Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and the song should continue another 8 minutes.

The album’s first track is a musical preface, much like a preface you might see in a book, and like in a book, you can skip it. I got what I was seeking in Black on Both Sides. I was so pissed off at how crappy that movie was that I went straight into Tower Records hoping to redeem my evening with a good CD purchase.

I purchased Black on Both Sides as an impulse buy at a mall after my roommate forced me to attend the second worst movie I’ve ever seen, George Lucas’ Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Mired is now long gone, but the memory of that headline stuck, and would ultimately lead me to buy Mos Def’s Black on Both Sides without even a cursory listening. The first time I ever heard the name Mos Def was in an old online magazine called Mired (a play on Wired magazine), with a headline that read “Mos Def Hates Whitey.” I didn’t know who Mos Def was (this was in 1997) but the headline made me laugh enough to read the article, which was actually a really solid review of a Mos Def live show.

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