Mos Definitely One of My 5 Desert Island Records

Mos Def - Black On Both Sides

Yuck. I just saw one of my favorite Clash songs on a Nissan ad.

It's funny, because it's not my favorite version of the song. "Pressure Drop", originally by Toots and the Maytals.

That's not really what this post is about.

This post is about one of my favorite pieces of music of all time, but not that one.

But you knew that.

I first heard the first track on this album, "Fear Not Of Man", on the radio driving up the I-5 from L.A. to San Francisco in 2000. "People be acting like Hip hop is some giant living in the hillside, coming down to visit the townspeople..." That shit caught my ear, but I never heard the DJ say who it was. So I slept on it for another year

I found the album in 2001. Didn't really know what I had found. I dug a few tracks on it, but never really gave it the proper beginning-to-end listen it deserves. I guess Abortatron hipped me to Mos - I would always see the Black Star CD in his books and want to hear it (This was 99-2000), and he would always say "Oh, that's not that good, you wouldn't like it". Which is still funny to me.

Anyway, so I had the album a year or so before I bought it on tape...

I remember that because I was staying in eastern Pennsylvania with my great grandmorther - The DC Sniper thing was going on, and Bethlehem is only three hours or so from DC so it was in the local news there every day. Myself, I was driving to Philly and back, which is about 90 miles, every day, every other day. Spending alot of time in my great grandmother's 94 tempo with the tape deck. SO I went to the mom and pops music place in Bethlehem (Play it Again I think, but I could be very wrong) and picked up cassettes of Ghostface's "Supreme Clientele" and "Black on Both Sides". It was a kind of impulse buy. I almost bought "1,039 Smoothed Out Slappy Hours" - Which could just as easily be the subject of this post.

Anyway, point is, I'd listen to both albums all the way through each way from Bethlehem to Philly and back. One time I stopped at a rest area on 476 in the middle of the night and the only two people there were two punk kids, a boy and a girl, making out. My head was full of "May-December" and "Child's Play" - I called Arriel from a payphone there to say hi for no reason except that these kids seemed to prove that love could exist and be found at three in the morning in a deserted rest area on an almost empty stretch of freeway in the mountains of eastern Pennsylvania.

I was a mess. Having this album with me then helped me make sense of things. One of the big messages of this record is that one right at the beginning - "So the next time you ask yourself where Hip Hop is going, ask yourself; Where am I going? How am I doing?" I never knew Hip Hop could be Inclusive. I always thought it was something Exclusive; I could observe and enjoy, but could never be a part of it, because of my complexion, because of my upbringing, because of my ignorance of everything but what I had heard and liked, because of whatever. Like I said, I had owned the record for awhile, but something about this particular trip, this particular time and place - It opened me up for the big message of this record which is that, to some degree, you make yr own world. Ha ha ha, punk rock as fuck.

You can't fuck with Mos Def, so don't even try.