Mos Def and Talib Kweli are Black Star Writing Project – Overview

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“In the jungle with the leaders — we them lions, you the cheetahs.
A cipher will complete us as we come through your receivers
You can play us and repeat us, and then take us home and read us”
– Mos Def and Talib Kweli, “Definition”

Mos Def and Talib Kweli are Black Star, the duo’s incredible 1998 album contains hundreds of lines but I think these three center something I want to explore. They synthesize so much of what makes great musical and poetic art: the boastful with the inclusive, the written with the oral, the live with the recorded. They also helped me get my head two ideas I want to explore in a series of posts: 1) the trajectory of thought and consciousness this album has brought me to as a listener, and 2) my experiences with my students as they have analyzed it over the past few years. I would like to synthesize these two threads into 3) what this has taught me about how listening to students’ ideas also enriches my own perspectives, and how ultimately they can continue and deepen their abilities to learn how to learn from each other.

Urban Dictionary’s first two entries for “cipher” are as follows: 1) “Two or more rappers freestyling together in an informal context. They could be battling or simply playing off of each other” and 2) “the completion of a circle consisting of 360 degrees, which is a whole.” Shout-out to Christopher Emdin, who talks a lot about the educational function of ciphers in For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood… and the Rest of Y’All Too. Shout-out to my school’s new-teacher induction program, which put me onto that book, and which is probably what got me on this train of thought with this album years before I ever heard it (I’m tragically late to the game on hip-hop).

Another idea of “cipher,” this one from Google’s dictionary – “a secret or disguised way of writing; a code” – and then continues, “a thing written in a cipher” and lastly, “a key to such a cipher.” In the duo’s challenge to “play us and repeat us, and then take us home and read us”, I hear all of that too.

Mos Def and Talib Kweli, as a duo, create a cipher built of cryptic, allusive, scholarly and playfully creative lyricism. Throughout the album they widen that circle, to include the their ancestors, fellow Brooklynites, past hip-hop masters like Slick Rick, “indigenous women of the planet earth,” break dancers, graffiti artists, spoken word performers, all cappted off by the five performers of the album’s final posse track. As I and my students and anyone else who has listened joins in, the circle widens further, but it is not, cannot be “complete” until that great movement of love and equality that the album both articulates as a possibility and performs as temporal reality has come to fruition.

I’m going to post about each song, really just as an act of appreciation, and because analyzing texts like this is something I like to do. Next time I’ll talk about track 1, “Intro.”