An analysis of the themes explored in Mos Def's Black on Both Sides
By Liam Allen
On 30th May 2018
Hip-hop artist Mos Def’s debut solo album Black on Both Sides turned eighteen at the end of last year. So much has happened in world politics during the album’s lifetime, but
it would certainly be disappointed to see at age eighteen that so few of the
issues it raised in its birth have come even slightly closer to being resolved.
Released on 12 October 1999, Black on
Both Sides is an example of so-called “socially-conscious” hip-hop,
treating in its lyrics all kinds of issues, from the social to the political to
the musical. On its release, Mos Def received many plaudits from critics for
his mould-breaking treatment of these various issues.
On 30th May 2018
Hip-hop artist Mos Def’s debut solo album Black on Both Sides turned eighteen at the end of last year. So much has happened in world politics during the album’s lifetime, but
it would certainly be disappointed to see at age eighteen that so few of the
issues it raised in its birth have come even slightly closer to being resolved.
Released on 12 October 1999, Black on
Both Sides is an example of so-called “socially-conscious” hip-hop,
treating in its lyrics all kinds of issues, from the social to the political to
the musical. On its release, Mos Def received many plaudits from critics for
his mould-breaking treatment of these various issues.
When was the last time you heard an MC drop a line like, "Mind over
matter and soul before flesh"? When was the last time you heard somebody
rap about the global economic and environmental consequences of first-world
corporate waste and subsequent aquatic pollution? When was the last time you
heard a hip-hopper sing competently over a phat-ass beat about the white
appropriation of black art forms?[1]
After
briefly looking at Mos Def’s inspirations from the past, we will attempt to
delve into all the socio-political themes that he explores in this album, and
what they reveal about the wider context of the US East Coast at the end of the
century, before making a quick assessment on the impact and legacy of Black on Both Sides and how it fits into
the context of 2017, eighteen years after its release.
Musically, you need only to look
at what has been sampled in Black on Both
Sides (henceforth BoBS) to see
the vast range of inspirations for Mos Def in this album. The black pioneers of
funk, soul and R&B are of course well-represented here, with such artists
as James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Dionne Warwick and Kool and the Gang appearing
at various points. He also draws from his contemporaries in rap such as Wu-Tang
Clan, A Tribe Called Quest and Mobb Deep. His depth of vision is demonstrated
in his sampling of music from German electronic outfit Kraftwerk, jazz pianist
Bill Evans, and even ‘60s and ‘70s rock stalwarts like Big Brother and the Holding
Company and Christine McVie. Perhaps most pertinent though is the inclusion of
Gil Scott-Heron’s A Legend in His
Own
Mind towards the end of the album.[2] Scott-Heron is considered by many to be the first rapper or MC ever, and was
certainly a key figure in the development of the genre of hip-hop. His
appearance on BoBS is representative
of what music writer BJ Steiner says about the album, that it ‘was consciously
designed as an appeal to rap's roots, serving as a tonic to rap fans who had
grown tired of commercial hip-hop's gangster obsession.’[3]
Mos makes this link to early hip-hop clear on the track Brooklyn, in which he writes ‘I’m from the slums that created the
bass that thump back’, evoking hip-hop’s origins in New York in the late 1970s.
This link is crucial to understanding the wider themes that Mos expresses in
this album. Michael Eric Dyson argues that hip-hop’s roots were inherently
political, and that the genre was borne out of ‘a culture of hardship.’[4]
It is important, therefore, to understand the type of hip-hop that Mos Def was
presenting in BoBS, one that was in
contrast to the “gangsta” style that was more associated with the West Coast
and which had become the most prevalent by the late ‘90s, and crucially, one
that was intended to evoke the political issues that black people in particular
faced in that era, as well as the perpetual issues they had faced even since
the beginnings of the genre.
 |
| Gil Scott-Heron |
To this end, one of the themes
that Mos Def explores in this album is the macro issue of “What is hip-hop?”
From the very beginning of the album, Mos establishes the link between hip-hop
and black culture and politics. In the opening track, Fear Not of Man, he says ‘You know what’s gonna happen with
hip-hop? Whatever’s happening with us.’ While by 1999 hip-hop production and
consumption was far from solely black, that hip-hop as a genre was a deeply
African-American invention and form of expression is self-evident, and what Mos
wants to establish from the start is that hip-hop and black society are
synonymous. He also highlights the importance of the hip-hop artist in wider
society. In the song Love, his ode to
hip-hop music, Mos poetically says ‘I MC; which means I Must Cultivate the
Earth’. Before we even get on to the political aspect of BoBS, Mos identifies a clear vision for where he places hip-hop in the
social canon, and indeed what vision he has for this album in African American
society. He does, however, place limits on the genre. He recognises that the
music in itself cannot be a sole vehicle for political change. He ends the
seminal Hip Hop with the lyrics ‘Hip-hop
will simply amaze you/praise you, pay you/do whatever you say do/but black, it
can’t save you’. This falls into line with what S. Craig Watkins argues about
the inability of hip-hop to have an effective impact on the political scene,
that it has ‘not been able to directly engage or affect the institutions
that impact young people’s lives.’[5]
Nelson George suggests that
hip-hop’s greatest influence on politics was turning its young listeners on to
icons of the civil rights movement like Malcolm X, as well as to its political
organisations like the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam.[6]
Perhaps this goes some way to explaining Mos Def’s own personal influences. Mos
converted to Islam at the age of nineteen, six years before the release of Black on Both Sides, and his faith is a
prominent theme in the album. In Love,
Mos says ‘Pray Allah keep my soul and heart clean/Pray the same thing again for
all my team’. Islam was often a refuge for many hip-hop artists of the
1990s. Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest, who also has a cameo on this album, was a
fellow member of the Nation of Islam. This religious element is representative
of both Mos’ inspiration from the Civil Rights Movement, and perhaps also his
anti-materialist and socially-conscious approach to hip-hop.
 |
| Malcolm X |
Another important element of his
approach, though, has to be his origins in Brooklyn, New York, and this is
another theme which runs through BoBS.
Brooklyn is referred to on eight of the seventeen tracks on the album, which
includes the back-to-back tracks Brooklyn
and Habitat, both love songs to the
place where Mos spent his formative years. What is particularly poignant about
these two tracks is that they create in Brooklyn a city of two halves. In one
phrase, Mos will exalt the city: ‘Sometimes I feel like I don’t have a
partner/Sometimes I feel like my only friend/Is the city I live in, is
beautiful Brooklyn’, calling it ‘best in the world and all USA’, then in the
next phrase he will bring it straight back down to earth: ‘The crack babies
tryin’ to find where they mamas at’; ‘The doorstep where the dispossessed
posted at/Dope fiends out at Franklin Ave sellin’ Zovirax’. Brooklyn, and more
widely New York City, as a melting pot of different cultures and classes, and
as the birthplace of hip-hop, would be the home for Mos Def’s style of
socially- and politically-conscious rap.
The New York of the late ‘90s was
a dichotomous one. On one hand, it was the financial capital of the USA and
homed some of the richest people in the world. On the other, particularly in
the “projects” of Mos Def’s Brooklyn, there was a lot of poverty and hardship,
mostly affecting the various ethnic minority groups that lived there. From 1996
onwards, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani attempted a crackdown on crime that was,
as Jeff Chang describes, ‘aimed at youths, the poor, the homeless and people of
color.’[7]
To that end, in 1997 and 1998, the NYPD’s Street Crime Units
‘stopped and
frisked 45,000 people, mostly young, male and Black or brown.’[8]
At the time of the recording of BoBS,
this issue was coming to a head. A spate of police shootings of immigrants in
February 1999 was followed by street protests led, in part, by hip-hop
activists.[9]
This created a very politically-charged environment which bled into the music
scene. Local hip-hop artists were also frustrated by the perceived debasement
of the genre on the West Coast, which had led the music ‘into a phase of
unadulterated consumerism and a celebration of nihilism’, meaning that the
music industry ‘was interested only in providing negative images of Black
people’.[10] This is the culture that
fomented the issues that are addressed in Black
on Both Sides, and we see in the lyrics a fierce attack on the social
problems of late ‘90s America. In Got,
Mos takes a shot at the “bling-bling” gangsta culture, poverty and crime in one
fell swoop: ‘Like, come on now ock, what you expect?/Got a month’s paycheck
danglin’ off your neck/…There’s hunger in the street that is hard to
defeat/Many steal for sport, but more steal to eat.’ But his ire does not end
in the local context. In New World Water,
Mos launches a fierce, yet nuanced, attack on global capitalism: ‘There are
places where TB is common as TV/’Cause foreign-based companies go and get
greedy/The type of cats who pollute the whole shore line/Have it purified, sell
it for a dollar twenty-five’.
 |
| Brooklyn, 1990s |
His attacks on capitalism,
though, are few and far-between, because it is clear that the focus of his
assault is racism. It is a racist system, not purely capitalism, that he
believes to be the cause of these social problems in New York and elsewhere,
and this is ferociously tackled on the penultimate, and perhaps most potent,
track on the album, Mathematics. The
track is far too packed with substance to do it justice by reproducing
individual lines here, but there are some that perfectly represent Mos’
frustrations: ‘The white unemployment rate is nearly more than triple for
black/Front-liners got their gun in your back’; ‘This is business: no faces,
just lines and statistics/From your phone, your zip code, to SSI digits/The
system breaks man, child, and women into figures/Two columns for who is and who
ain’t niggers’; ‘When the average minimum wage is five-fifteen/You best believe
you’ve got to find a new grind to get cream’. In addition, the track Mr. Nigga provides a comprehensive and
emotional account of the racism that black people, and indeed Mos himself, face
in their everyday life: ‘Who be riding up in the high-rise elevator?/Other
tenants who be praying that he ain’t the new neighbour/Mr. Nigga’; ‘Now, who is
the cat at Armani buying wears/With the tourist who be asking him, do you work
here?/Mr. Nigga’.
Perhaps what stands out the most
though in BoBS is Mos Def’s appeals
to his black listeners to stand up and get involved in the fight against
institutionalised racism. He bemoans, at various points in the album, the lack
of action amongst the minority community and the perpetuation of racial
stereotypes. Speed Law, for example,
is an indictment on those who turn their back on their
community and act only
in self-interest, instead of giving back or trying to change things,
perpetuating stereotypes of criminality in the process: ‘Brooklyn take what you
can’t take back/I know a lot of cats hate that/All I can say black/There’s a
city full of walls you can post complaints at’. In a shameless glorification of
black values and identity, though, Mos attempts to motivate his young audience
to try and change things. The track Do it
Now is a fun, upbeat exaltation of blackness, with its chorus of ‘Say it
loud/Black and proud/Ain’t no time to hesitate at the gate/Do it now!’ In Hip Hop, Mos tries to point out what can
be achieved by coming together as a community: ‘We went from picking cotton/To
chain gang line chopping/To Bebopping/To Hip-Hopping’. Perhaps what is most
poignant in this album is Mos’ admittance, in UMI Says, that he does not want to be involving himself in
political discourse, but he feels an obligation for the sake of the betterment
of society: ‘Sometimes I get discouraged/I look around and things are so
weak/People are so weak/Sometimes, sometimes I feel like crying’; ‘Sometimes I
don’t wanna be a soldier/Sometimes I just wanna be a man, but/I want black
people to be free, to be free, to be free/All my people to be free, to be free,
to be free’.
 |
| Mos Def - Ms. Fat Booty and Mathematics |
What can be heard in Black on Both Sides, and what makes it a
great album, is its extremely nuanced portrayal of African-American life in the
US in the late 1990s, as well as well-informed and well-treated musings on
everything from the state of Hip Hop to the purpose of life. This has meant that
the album continues to be just as relevant, and at times just as moving, today
as it was at the end of the century. It must not be said, however, that the
album is devoid of entertainment in the pursuit of socio-political pertinence.
The songs New World Water and Mr. Nigga, for example, despite their
heavy subjects, are lively, upbeat, and even playful, without losing their
gravity. Mos even finds space for the self-effacing, tongue-in-cheek, unashamed
Ms. Fat Booty, which plays to
hip-hop’s more superficial (and perhaps misogynistic) side, with playful lines
such as ‘I seen her on the Ave, spotted her more than once/Ass so fat that you
could see it from the front’ and ‘Man, I smashed it like a Idaho potato’. What
merits being said, then, is that Black on
Both Sides is capable of evoking a whole spectrum of emotions and
sentiments, and that is perhaps why it remains today not only lyrically
poignant but also musically irresistible.
Bibliography
Referenced:
Boyd, Todd, The New H.N.I.C. The
Death of Civil Rights and the Reign of Hip Hop (New York, 2002)
Chang, Jeff, Can’t Stop
Won’t Stop (London, 2007)
Dyson, Michael Eric, Know
What I Mean? (New York, 2010)
George, Nelson, Hip Hop
America (London, 2005)
Goldman, Andrew, ‘Mos Def. Black on Both
Sides’, Pitchfork, 12 October 1999, https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5440-black-on-both-sides
(26 November 2017)
Steiner, BJ, ‘Today in Hip-Hop: Mos Def Drops ‘Black on Both Sides’
Album’, XXL Mag, 12 October 2013, http://www.xxlmag.com/news/hip-hop-today/2013/10/today-hip-hop-mos-def-releases-black-sides
(26 November 2017)
Watkins, S. Craig, Hip Hop
Matters. Politics, Pop Culture, and the Struggle for the Soul of a Movement
(Boston, 2005)
WhoSampled, ‘Black on Both Sides (1999)’, https://www.whosampled.com/album/Mos-Def/Black-On-Both-Sides
(26 November 2017)
Wider reading on
the topic:
Chick, Stevie, ‘Mos Def: Black on
Both Sides (Rawkus)’, New Musical
Express, 20 November 1999, https://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/mos-def-iblack-on-both-sidesi-rawkus
(26 November 2017)
Forman, Murray, The Hood Comes
First: Race, Space and Place in Rap and Hip Hop (Middletown, 2002)
Juon, Steve, ‘Mos Def: Black on Both Sides: Rawkus Records’, OHHLA, 16 October 1999, http://www.rapreviews.com/archive/1999_10_blackonbothsides.html
(26 November 2017)
Pearce, Sheldon, ‘Rap's fraught history with Black Lives Matter: 'I
didn't sign up to be no activist'’, The
Guardian, 10 November 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/nov/10/rap-black-lives-matter-lil-wayne-vic-mensa-beyonce-asap-rocky
(26 November 2017)
Rabin, Nathan, ‘Mos Def: Black on
Both Sides’, AV Club, 12 October
1999, https://music.avclub.com/mos-def-black-on-both-sides-1798192179 (26
November 2017)
Spence, Lester K., Stare in the
Darkness. The Limits of Hip-hop and Black Politics (Minnesota, 2011)
(Lyric transcriptions are my own, with occasional reference to Genius:
https://genius.com/albums/Yasiin-bey/Black-on-both-sides)
[1] Andrew
Goldman, ‘Mos Def. Black on Both Sides’, Pitchfork,
12 October 1999, https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5440-black-on-both-sides
(26 November 2017).
[2] WhoSampled,
‘Black on Both Sides (1999)’,
https://www.whosampled.com/album/Mos-Def/Black-On-Both-Sides (26 November 2017).
[3] BJ
Steiner, ‘Today in Hip-Hop: Mos Def Drops ‘Black on Both Sides’ Album’, XXL Mag, 12 October 2013,
http://www.xxlmag.com/news/hip-hop-today/2013/10/today-hip-hop-mos-def-releases-black-sides
(26 November 2017).
[4] Michael
Eric Dyson, Know What I Mean? (New
York, 2010), p.72.
[5] S.
Craig Watkins, Hip Hop Matters. Politics,
Pop Culture, and the Struggle for the Soul of a Movement (Boston, 2005),
p.149.
[6] Nelson
George, Hip Hop America (London,
2005), p.154.
[7] Jeff
Chang, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop (London,
2007), p.455.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid., p.456.
[10] Todd
Boyd, The New H.N.I.C. The Death of Civil
Rights and the Reign of Hip Hop (New York, 2002), p.52.
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