Paying the rent De La Soul, Mos Def, and Talib Kweli stay in business BY FRANKLIN SOULTS

The long weekend before Election Day in my home town of Cleveland was like the rushed, nonsensical climax of a dream. Diehard leftists, down-and-out bohemians, and famous performers flooded in from across the nation, as people from Bruce Springsteen to an extra from One Life To Live (I gave him a lift after he’d finished a long day of canvassing) put themselves on the line to keep their idea of the American Dream alive. Then, on Election Night, just when we all started to suffer our mass rude awakening, De La Soul showed up. These three seminal forerunners of today’s "conscious," progressive, so-called underground hip-hop weren’t in Cleveland to commit to a dream. They were here to get paid.

At least, that’s what a friend tells me who caught their half-empty show that night. He went because his rap crew were opening for the headliners, who were touring for The Grind Date (AOI/Sanctuary Urban), their first CD in three very grinding years. Like so many conscious Clevelanders, my friend had spent Election Day doing whatever last-minute political work he could, so after his set, he joined the crowd watching the returns on the TV at the back bar. De La Soul, meanwhile, performed an unremarkable set and then split. "They didn’t seem that concerned with the election," said my friend. In the words of De La’s contemporaries, the very un-conscious EPMD: "Business, never personal."

Or, in the recent words of Mos Def, the most gifted inheritor of the Natives Tongues’ mantle, "Fuck you! Pay me!" That’s the repeated chorus closing "War," a typically confusing track on the Brooklyn rapper’s eagerly awaited second solo album, The New Danger (Geffen/Interscope). The cut starts with the kind of deft, politically sweeping rhymes that earned the former Dante Smith his stage name. But after an old movie clip in which some proper Englishman intones about man helping his fellow man of all races, Mos Def bursts into derisive laughter and starts shouting that chorus over headbanging rock. Then there’s Mos Def’s one-time partner, Talib Kweli, who also recently released an eagerly awaited second solo album, The Beautiful Struggle (Rawkus). If anything, Kweli has always been even more politically declamatory than Mos Def, but on the album-closing title track, he qualifies his terms: "You try to vote and participate in the government and the motherfucking Democrats is acting like Republicans." And: "They call me the political rapper even after I tell them I don’t fuck with politics." And: "I don’t want to change your ways, don’t want to lead you off your path/You try to change the world, so please excuse me while I laugh."

What’s going on? Maybe nothing but the rent — that is, payment to maintain the bad-ass outsider status that has kept hip-hop so strong for so long. Ever since Chuck D’s "other man" started following rap in numbers larger than the "brother man," rap’s right to represent all kinds of real and imaginary outsiders — first and foremost underprivileged African-Americans — has gotten costlier. What you gain in maintaining street cred, you pay for by giving up political sensitivity. And what distinguishes the river of underground rap from the mainstream isn’t so much a difference in their outsider status or the mounting cost of maintaining it as in how the two streams negotiate their payments for those cribs in the hood.

By and large, mainstream rappers do what Dubya does with his mounting debt — they ignore it. Of course, rap’s party and bullshit is a lot more benign than the Party of Bu**sh**. But in both cases, we’re the ones left to foot the bill, either with a stagnant economy or with stagnant music. In contrast, underground rappers have found numerous ways to pay their debts, and the new albums by De La Soul, Mos Def, and Talib Kweli represent just three of them.

The only one that doesn’t meet its due bill is The Beautiful Struggle. Not that it’s bankrupt like, say, the Jay-Z & R. Kelly "Best of Both Worlds" tour. (Trust me.) In fact, its shortcomings are so mundane and its strong moments are so likable, you keep hoping the disc might manage to scrape together the rent one way or another. Since exploding in the underground with his former high-school pal on their 1998 debut, Mos Def and Talib Kweli Are Black Star (Rawkus), Kweli has steadily worked toward a bigger, brighter stage, so it makes sense that he’d now try to front tinny 808-style beats and female R&B choruses, like Nelly with a thesaurus, working to open minds as he bounces the booty. Yet the words ring all too true as Mary J. Blige coos, "You know I try," while Talib raps, "This is my product and you know I gotta move it." On the next cut, Kweli muffles a pledge to radical secularism under a Police "interpolation" so corny it would make P. Diddy blush. The disc doesn’t fully recover until the title-track closer, in which his political agnosticism is made more intriguing by the warm, haunting beats of his fail-safe old partner Hi-Tek.

Still, it’s a long way from Mos Def and Talib Kweli Are Black Star. Stark yet sophisticated, that disc became the Raw and the Cooked of today’s underground hip-hop, throwing gasoline on the embers of a dormant subculture. The Beautiful Struggle dampens those embers by trying to spread them into a bigger pit.

Mos Def, meanwhile, doesn’t even bother with the fire, instead dousing gas on his own image and lighting a fresh match. The inclination to immolate his image speaks to his love of acting (he’s got serious film, Broadway, and TV credits) and also to his smoldering ambition. As a musician, he’s never been more impressive, being steeped in the blues and all its offshoots so hard, he almost succeeds in regathering the African Diaspora on one disc, claiming punk rock, metal, hip-hop, jazz, Marvin Gaye, and even Hair as his own. But his attitude has never been so offputting, as he projects personas that are suspicious, boastful, disdainful, and self-interested. Often, Mos Def even chucks his deft raps for hollow chants and slovenly mumblings: "I’ll be your boogie man," "I am that nigger," "My whole life is real," whatever.

In short, he’s acting the part of that Nigga Ya Love To Hate, Part 37 Million. If you think the focus is misplaced at this historical juncture, well, that might make Mos Def’s blackface even more bracing than it would be if you agreed with his reductionism. Mos’s effrontery jolts your perspective, engaging your entire brain like all the most daring art. This isn’t to excuse his ugly prejudices, which probably reach their lowest point on "The Rape Over," a rewrite of Jay-Z’s "The Takeover" that blasts every non-hip-hop entity "running this rap shit," including "quasi-homosexuals." But give credit to his instinct to let his band, Black Jack Johnson, jam away while he’s venting his subconscious like John Lennon fronting the Plastic Ono Band, because the Plastic Ono Band weren’t one fifth as funky as P-Funk’s Bernie Worrell (keys), Living Coloür’s Will Calhoun (drums), and especially the Bad Brains’ Gary Miller (a/k/a Dr. Know), who — finally — makes this hip-hop’s first good punk guitar album.

The price of this blackface — what’s being lost for the sake of bad-ass cred — can be heard on two new albums on the upstart Illson Media label. Medina Green’s U-Know the Flex: The Mix Tape Vol-01 mostly features Mos Def’s younger brother, DCQ (a/k/a Jashiya Illson), in decent, darkly tinged underground tough talk. But one track, "Beef," features Mos Def himself front and center, setting geopolitical horror, personal tragedy, and street-corner bluster in proper proportion with the sharpest rap since his 1999 solo debut. And UTD’s Manifest Destiny is better yet, an unreleased gem from 1996 that features Mos Def, DCQ, and their friend Ces, a female rapper who cut her teeth on MC Lyte. Not that she totally bites Lyte’s style, because this trio nibble at every worthy style of hip-hop’s golden age, especially the trippy lilt of the Native Tongues crews. As they bluff their way past thugs and blow through Brooklyn at midnight, they earn the right to their album title, which is reminiscent of a time when rap still didn’t know the meaning of back rent.

Some critics have claimed the same for De La Soul’s "If It Wasn’t for You," on production team Handsome Boy Modeling School’s fun, funny, and occasionally wonderful spoof White People (Atlantic/Elektra). Reuniting the trio with their great early producer, Prince Paul, the track is playful and goofy and unpredictably clever like the crew’s best classic tracks. Yet it doesn’t compare with The Grind Date, which De La Soul acknowledge is simply their attempt to get back on their feet and get by "thought free," as De La’s Dave puts it in a press release. If Talib Kweli is trying to buy his way into mainstream legitimacy and Mos Def is trying to buy every stereotype of black rebellion, De La Soul are going full circle and remembering Q-Tip’s line in ’89: "Black is black is black is black." So as on their two Art Official Intelligence masterpieces, only without the heightened ambition, they nestle again into the bosom of soul and funk that most mainstream hip-hop only skims, trading their youthful playfulness for an adult day job as reliable black entertainers.

The lead single, "Shopping Bags," is about gold diggers, for Christ’s sake, but man, does it hit on the one. Every cut is dense with thumping beats, incessant soul samples, and rhymes that bear fruit as you instinctively reach for replay to hear that hook one more time. Highlights include a guest appearance by Ghostface, the Motowny "No," and "Church," which is about replacing "rebellion with rebirth" and coping in a world that almost never goes the way of our dreams. Its opening line: "Wake up!"