Credit: Tuomas Vitikainen

By the very late 1990s, hip-hop had begun to change, realising its popular, commercial appeal and, with that, came a broad shift into capitalistic, macho braggadocio, away from the social consciousness that had been evident even in the music of leading figures like Biggie and Tupac only years earlier.

But there was resistance to this shiny commercialisation of rap, and arguably no figure represented this countervailing tendency more than a young Mos Def. With his deeply clever 1999 debut solo album, Black On Both Sides, he used the form to express complex, political ideas as a stark reminder of what the genre, in the hands of an intelligent, socially aware artist, could become. 

How many other rappers, of that period or this one, are comfortable knitting Arabic terms into their music as in the track ‘UMI Says’, issuing a warning about a global water crisis as on ‘New World Water’, or reeling off hard stats in order to paint a picture of social inequality, as in ‘Mathematics’? It is a prescient work, dealing with social ills that, over the quarter-century following its release, would only become more pressing.

The water crisis described in ‘New World Water’ is even more frightening today than it was in 1999, as climate breakdown accelerates and becomes ever more dangerous and visible, while Mos’ description of “luxury tenements choking the skyline” of Brooklyn in the track ‘Hip Hop’ presages the gentrification that his hometown would suffer in the coming years. Mos appears largely sensitive to the social ills of his time, and he has the foresight to see how much worse they can get.

Much of the album serves as a historically literate journey through Black history and culture—“we went from picking cotton / to chain gang line chopping / to be bopping / to hip hopping”—delivered in the form of tight wordplay projected by Mos’ syrupy vocals. He reveals the United States’ most sordid characteristics, its exploitation of Black bodies and culture, representing a prominent concern with the lines, “America’s five centuries deep in cotton money”, on the Q-Tip-featured track ‘Mr N’. The appropriation of Black music by white people is parsed through on ‘Rock N Roll’, where he spits, “Elvis Presley ain’t got no soul / Jimi Hendrix is rock and roll / You may dig on The Rolling Stones / But everything they did they stole”, while also name-checking other lesser-known Black musical pioneers like hardcore group Bad Brains. 

While the American political mainstream of the post-Cold War era in the late ’90s may have been patting itself on the back and proclaiming an “end of history”, in which social ills had been, to a large extent, dealt with and progress was inevitable, Mos saw that the past traumas of American culture remained unresolved. As a result, Black Americans and other ethnic minorities in America and elsewhere are today living with the consequences of that failure to deal with this underlying racism.

To focus so much on the more political aspects of the album may serve it poorly, because, while it is intelligent and serious, it is also remarkably playful, be that in terms of the samples it is built upon or the fun of Mos’ words. The album’s hit song ‘Ms Fat Booty’ is a dancefloor filler that also serves as a frisky, thoughtful reflection on attraction and, ultimately, a bruised male ego, and its depiction of the experience of lust is plainly real. Black On Both Sides may be at its best when dealing with social ills, but that is far from its only angle.

Mos Def, who now performs as Yasiin Bey, has arguably never topped his debut album, but that’s a tall ask. It was the perfect record for a time in which hip-hop was being pulled away from its conscious roots, serving to remind in a balanced way that another path is always available.