"Mr Nigga": Mos Def (feat. Q-Tip)
Produced: Q-Tip, DProsper and Yasiin Bey (a.k.a Mos Def)
Album: Black on Both Sides
‘They say they want you successful, but then they make it stressful/ you start keeping pace, they start changing up the tempo.’
There are tons of quotables from this track and to be honest just a list of those should be enough to make anyone interested in giving this song their attention. The artist formerly known as Mos Def is truly a rapper’s rapper and one of the most underappreciated renaissance men of the late 90s/early 2000s era. Yasiin Bey can rap rings around anyone who dares get on the mic with him, he has sung with the Isley Brothers, has played several prominent roles on the small screen and is one hell of a bassist. But this is about Mr Nigga, the seminal track from Bey’s legendary Black on Both Sides. As a song, it is a masterfully weaved narrative documenting the illusions of black capitalism as a social leveller and the institutional double standards in the contemporary US (the flight attendant verse is my personal fave). Now, Mos is not without controversy.
The bars on Michael Jackson and OJ Simpson are insensitive and ill thought out. It is the one taint on a song that poignantly exposes US racial dynamics.