Mos Def gets rapped up in black rock

By Richard Cromelin
Los Angeles Times

Mos Def, who will play the Pipeline Cafe on Saturday, says "I was really, really frustrated when I would see these bands that were derivative of what hip-hop was." Mos Def 9 p.m. Saturday Pipeline Cafe $33, $45; for 18 and older (877) 750-4400 Also featuring Microscopic Syllables

That last one was bad enough to make one promising rapper all but torpedo his career momentum to clear the tainted air.

"I don't like insincerity in people, and I hate it when people pose," says Mos Def, 30 (who's heading for a concert Saturday night at Pipeline Cafe in Honolulu). "I was really, really frustrated when I would see these bands that were derivative of what hip-hop was. They would take like a rock riff and sprinkle some hip-hop on it and oh, it was this amazing thing. ... That (stuff) has been done before, and it's been done better. I just got tired of it."

Mos Def's first two major records, the collaborative "Mos Def & Talib Kweli Are Black Star" in 1998 and his 1999 debut solo album, "Black on Both Sides," established the Brooklyn native in hip-hop's progressive wing.

But it's taken five years for the recently released follow-up, "The New Danger," to appear, largely because of his Ahab-like quest to reclaim rock for black musicians.

"I think there is a social and racial dynamic that comes into play," he says. "Limp Bizkit and those bands were like these mannequins, these caricatures of what we started, and the people who were really doin' it are not being recognized at all. It's the classic story.

"So I just did it myself. I worked on it as my little experiment."

He called his project Black Jack Johnson, named for the controversial boxing champion whose travails a century ago have made him a symbol of racial persecution.

Mos Def's "Black on Both Sides" was dominated by a jazzy, R&B-flavored brand of hip-hop, but the next one would exalt the legacy of such African-American rock bands as Fishbone.

Gathering a hard-rock band made up of guitarist Dr. Know from Bad Brains, Parliament Funkadelic keyboardist Bernie Worrell and two members of Living Colour, bassist Doug Wimbish and drummer Will Calhoun, he began recording.

Sitting at a poolside table at the Chateau Marmont during a recent visit to Los Angeles, Mos Def — born Dante Smith — doesn't seem like a crusading firebrand. His manner is more that of a scholar and teacher. He speaks with a soft voice and avoids eye contact, gazing into the distance or glancing downward during an early afternoon interview.

His early promise and his position as a pundit in the hip-hop community raised expectations for "The New Danger," whose final version intersperses some of the Black Jack Johnson rock material with an array of R&B-flavored hip-hop tracks.

But sales have been modest, and the reviews have been mixed. Even many of the admiring commentaries have noted the album's unevenness and sprawl.

If anyone has the luxury of making a doggedly individual album it may be Mos Def, because his acting career has all the heat that his music career doesn't.

More and more rappers are taking a stab at acting, but Mos Def was an actor first, and has carved a distinctive film and stage career — from an early Obie-winning performance off-Broadway to his turn on Broadway in the Pulitzer-Prize-winning "Topdog/Underdog" and his Emmy-nominated work in the HBO movie "Something the Lord Made." He's in "The Woodsman," and Disney's "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," due out this year.

He started acting as a teenager, working his way into theater and TV. Meantime, hip-hop had a grip on him from the day he heard Run-DMC's "It's Like That" booming from the doorway of a Bronx social club. Two decades later, the magic and meaning of that culture continue to enthrall him.

"People treat hip-hop like an isolated phenomenon," he says. "They don't treat it as a continuum, a history or a legacy. And it really is. And like all mediums or movements, it came out of a need. Like the Beat era came out of a need and a response to a social climate, a political climate, a personal climate. That's all that any art really is, and it's no accident when these things get airborne and expand. Because they're timely, and they're speaking to what's really going on.

"Hip-hop was a response to isolation. Under-representation. Misrepresentation. Abandonment. Poverty. Outlaw classification. There was a lot of things going on in New York City in the late '70s. A very difficult time, and that's the era that hip-hop came out of. They was doin' this to survive. To create some sort of psychic space of inclusion. The world does not want us, so we have to create our own world where we want each other. If no one else wants us, we want each other."