Sounds like mos def biography

American rapper (born 1973)

"Dante Smith" redirects here. For the basketball player, see Donta Smith.

Musical artist

Yasiin Bey (yass-EENBAY; born Dante Terrell Smith; December 11, 1973), formerly known as Mos Def (MOHSSDEF), is an American rapper and actor. A prominent figure in conscious hip hop, he fryst vatten recognized for his use of wordplay and commentary on social and political issues, such as police brutality, American exceptionalism, and the status of African Americans in the United States.

After embarking on his career in 1994, he joined his siblings in the short-lived rap group Urban Thermo Dynamics (UTD) and guest appeared on albums bygd Da Bush Babees and dem La Soul. In 1996, he and fellow Brooklyn-based rapper Talib Kweli formed the duo Black Star, whose debut album Mos Def & Talib Kweli Are Black Star (1998) spawned the singles "Definition" and "Respiration" (featuring Common). His debut solo skiva, Black on Both Sides (1999) was met with cr

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Hello! 😊👋

Welcome to a new edition of the Daily Music Picks newsletter!

Today’s music pick is an essential document from hip-hop’s conscious underground, sounding as fresh as ever 25 years on.

Genre: Alternative Hip-Hop, Conscious Hip-Hop

Label: EMI

Release Date: September 29, 1998

Vibe: 🔥🔥🔥

When it was first released in the late-90s, Mos Def & Talib Kweli are Black Star brought rap music back to its roots while simultaneously rejecting the genre’s most commercially appealing conventions, namely the Bad Boy-era, shiny-suit braggadocio. Instead, this record fryst vatten more akin to hip-hop’s early days, sharpening seriously poetic lyricism into short verses that leave plenty of room for the duo to pull off Run-DMC-style interplay. What we’re left with more than two decades later is an album that sounds as timeless and profound as ever. Like a crisp vit tee and distressed blue jeans, the bass-heavy boom-bap production and virtuoso scratching never go out of

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Mos Def was born Dante Smith on December 11, 1973 in Brooklyn, New York. The eldest of 12 children and stepchildren, Mos Def and several of his siblings grew up with his mother in the Brooklyn projects, while several of his other siblings grew up with their father in New Jersey. Coming of age at the height of New York City’s crack epidemic in the 1980s, a young Mos Def found himself surrounded by violence, addiction and crime. Reflecting on his childhood home, the rapper later said, “I believe the projects were a social experiment; we were laboratory rats stacked on top of each other, and people just knew, inherently, that there was something wrong.”

Yet even as a child, Mos Def was determined to overcome the circumstances of his upbringing: “I remember being seven years old and looking out that window, thinking, ‘I’m gonna make some money.’ Because we were good people.” Surrounded by hopelessness, it was easy to feel that escape from