This interview originally appeared in MAINTAIN Magazine, the Badger Herald’s monthly music magazine, in December 2002.
“You need to get articulate in interviews / They’ll spit on you if you pitiful/ Get a few brews in you at a party and you’re invincible,” Talib Kweli rapped, reciting the lines in his car while driving through Brooklyn the night before leaving to play a few club dates in London.
Quoted rapping one of those phrases in December in The New York Times, Kweli had his rhymes partially taken out of context. The Times writer did, however, make a widely believed statement in the piece: “For anyone who has ever yearned for rappers to be more reasonable, Talib Kweli is a dream come true: an earnest fellow preoccupied with the scourge of social privation and the healing power of music.”
On Quality, Kweli, the father of two children (daughter Diani and son Amani) as well as two albums (Black Star with Mos Def and Reflection Eternal with Hi-Tek), not to mention his slew of guest appearances and cameos, matriculates into the world of solo artists. In the process, he finally solidifies himself as a seasoned player.
Employing an all-star list of producers, including former Slum Village member Jay Dee, Cali king DJ Quick, Roots member DJ Scratch, Roc-A-Fella hitman Kanye West (“Kanye lit a fire under me,” Kweli said), as well an impressive group of others, the album is Kweli’s first chance to shine alone.
“With [Quality], it was all me. It is a reflection of my musical tastes,” he said. “There was no compromise with this album. Not that a compromise is bad, but I didn’t have to do it this time.”
The eldest of two sons born to educator parents, Talib Kweli started writing at a young age. Growing up in New York City during hip-hop’s golden age, he eventually segued from writing to emceeing.
“I wasn’t really one of the cool kids,” Kweli said. “Hip-hop became a way for me to write and be cool. It gave me a language to speak to my peers. In junior high I started writing rhymes for my friends, and then I eventually began writing rhymes for myself.”
Heading off to a boarding academy for high school, Kweli spent his breaks in Washington Square Park, where he honed his skills and eventually hooked up with his later partner-in-rhyme, Mos Def, still known then as Dante Smith. On a trip to Cincinnati around that time, Kweli had a chance meeting with another musical collaborator, Tony “DJ Hi-Tek” Cottrell.
Teaming up with both Def and Cottrell, Kweli managed to establish himself as one of the leaders in a post-Biggie, post-Tupac era of nonconformist artists. Calling out to a community in a state of confusion, Kweli picked up the mic and recorded “Manifesto,” a song that laid out his hopes for the hip-hop generation as it reworked B.I.G.’s “10 Crack Commandments,” a brutal set of guidelines for those involved in block-corner pharmacy.
“‘Manifesto’ was sort of for me, and I was very close to the song,” Kweli said. “I wanted to do an outline for my life, and it became something that really opened some ears.”
In the song, Kweli tells other rhyme spitters to “understand the meaning of MC / The power to move the crowd like Moses split the sea.”
Finishing the song, he raps, “Every MC grab a pen / And write some conscious lyrics to tell the children / I’ll say it again, every MC find you a pen and drop some conscious shit for our children / The Manifesto!” And you wonder why he got the “conscious” tag.
Without Hi-Tek, (“He is good, just really busy with his own projects,” Kweli said), and with Mos Def leading a busy life as a Broadway actor and host of HBO’s “Def Poetry Slam,” Kweli took a step back when recording Quality and reworked the rap blueprint he used in the past.
“I realized in the past that I was trying to do too much, and I alienated some people,” he said. “With Quality, my focus was having fun and enjoying myself and making something that spoke to the soul before it spoke to your mind.”
However, Kweli didn’t stray too far off into party land and leave the “conscious” tag behind. “The Proud,” a somber, Ayatollah-produced track, spoke to the Oklahoma City and Sept. 11, 2001, bombings, as well as the nation’s leadership, before hitting one of Kweli’s most addressed issues: police brutality.
Just after the three-minute mark of “The Proud,” Kweli raps, “Kurt Loder asks me what I say to a dead cop’s wife / People kill my people every day / That’s life.” These words refer to a televised interview in late 1998 after a New Jersey benefit concert for the imprisoned Mumia Abu-Jamal, a Pennsylvania journalist accused of killing a Philadelphia police officer in the early 1980s.
“I did a ‘Free Mumia’ concert in the Meadowlands a few years ago with the Beastie Boys and Bad Religion, and Kurt Loder approached me, and the first thing he asked me was,
‘What would [you] say to the wife of (killed police officer) William Faulkner?'” he said. “I really thought it was an unfair question because, you know, I didn’t kill William Faulkner. I am just standing up for [Abu-Jamal], who had his rights taken away.”
So what does this new school leader want to tell the world now?
“I want people to know how hard I work on my craft and how I have been able to maintain a level of consistency,” Kweli said. “A lot of people that started in this movement at the same time, and I don’t want to name any names, were just as talented, if not more talented, than me and Mos.
“But we just found a way to stay relevant, and I really work at that.”
Talib Kweli opens for Common tonight at 8 p.m. at the Orpheum Theatre, 216 State St. Tickets are $25 and are available at all Ticketmaster outlets and at the Orpheum box office.
