With leftfield collaborations with Slick Rick on one side and the reedy-feely Georgia Anne Muldrow on the other, The Ecstatic isn’t the concentrated wonder that is Black on Both Sides, but it’s a refreshing bounce back from the precipice of the Land of Sellout. Both “Auditorium” and “Revelations,” with their spaghetti western samples and interjected raspberries, sound like flat-out remixes of Madvillain’s “All Caps” the entire album careens wildly, free from the constraints of chorus and verse, like the best from Stones Throw’s back catalogue. It’s probably the fullest standalone song on the whole album, which otherwise proudly bears the trademark stamp of producer Madlib’s cinematic sound palate (solidly emulated by his younger brother Oh No). Killer of Sheep‘s Watts neighborhood isn’t Bed-Stuy, but Mos Def makes the leap of faith as deftly as the pictured boy, leaping from rooftop to rooftop. Set against a magisterial beat, it alone validates the borrowing of Burnett on the cover. As some of the other reviews have stated, disk one sounds horrible, almost unlistenable. had to flee”) are juxtaposed against a clear-eyed view of the reality that sets in harder with each passing year. My version of this was recently purchased (sealed) in 2022. But despite the calculation and consumer-minded distribution model, The Ecstatic turns out to be a modest but unmistakable step back toward comparable consciousness.īefitting a return to roots, “Live in Marvelous Times” is Mos Def’s “I Wish,” a hard-edged return to Bedford-Stuyvesant circa 1982 (“the pre-crack era”) in which bittersweet memories of the pop culture that was (“My phone wasn’t touchtone, a heavy beef in the street E.T. The highs of the album, in my view, are the tracks Quiet Dog (Bite Hard), Life in Marvelous Times, History (featuring Talib Kweli) and the closer, Casa Bey. Makes sense, as Mos Def’s albums since 1999’s subtly uncompromising Black on Both Sides have steadily moved closer and closer to a digestible, off-the-rack accessibility, culminating in True Magic, which pleased no one. A line of T-shirts will be sold in July that not only feature the album’s cover art (a still from the Charles Burnett film Killer of Sheep), but also a coded tag which buyers can use to download their own copy of the album. While not quite on the same scale as Prince handing out free copies of Musicology to every concert ticketholder, Mos Def’s new album The Ecstatic will soon be made available free of charge (in a sense) to music-minded fashionistas. “Twilight Speedball” posits the rapper’s flow as a drug, full of “bad news and good dope.” and despite invoking Obama on “History,” Mos trades rhymes with old partner Talib Kweli, powerfully asserting that the present remains tense - and hope still has a lot of work to do.Such is the ragged state of the music industry that it’s almost a shock that some musicians still care enough about how many albums they sell that they forge new models of media distribution. “Wahid” continues the Near Eastern theme as Mos lyrically collapses the inner city and the battlefield, two places where guns and bulletproof vests proliferate.
While he professes to send his message to the “penthouse, pavement, and curb,” it’s the grimy, not glossy, that dominates here. Despite estimable acting chops ( The Woodsman, Something the Lord Made), the former Black Star co-captain is among our greatest MCs, and The Ecstatic is easily his finest full-length since Black on Both Sides, his 1999 solo debut.įirst single “Life in Marvelous Times” builds a furious narrative - moving from the rapper’s project upbringing to the present, where wonders and terrors abound - over an epic, sticky synth beat (from Ed Banger producer Mr.
Worse yet, the music is locked in an incessant, almost fearful. Within a few verses of thunderous lead-off track “Supermagic,” underpinned by a righteous sample of Turkish psych songstress Selda Bagcan, “Cherokee chief rocka” Mos Def more than makes amends for three years away from hip-hop, not to mention his disastrous 2006 Geffen swan song, True Magic. Downtown Records It is the eternal struggle of hip-hop music, the great lamentation of critics and fans alike, that the genre is so often heavily loaded with almost stereotypical hedonism, greed, homophobia, and sexism that it becomes a parody of itself.
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