Before Black Star was formed, Yasiin Bey and Talib Kweli were just trying to make it in the music industry. The former had a record deal but was still carving a name for himself. The latter worked open mics and worked an ordinary job in the background. They’d always been friends, but they couldn’t quite figure out how to break into the game. Rather than do it on their own, they decided to do it together.
“One day, I bought this jazz album, I think it was Milt Jackson and Lionel Hampton, and I said, ‘That’s it, we need to do a collabo like jazz, a one-album deal,’” Bey (aka Mos Def) told SPIN. “I was big on being sovereign and free. And they gave us, like, $80,000, $90,000 to record, which was more money than we’d ever seen at one time. I’d just had my first child, and the goal wasn’t about trying to become a star; it was to become a real, working artist.”
Eventually, this led them to create their debut album as Black Star, released 28 years ago today. The pair landed on the name in reference to the shipping company of Marcus Garvey, a Pan-African activist whose mindset and philosophy the two rappers deeply aligned with. The goal was to create music that spoke to the realities of Black neighborhoods without glorifying violence or exorbitant luxuries.
Mos Def and Talib Kweli Come Together as Black Star 28 Years Ago Today
“Reckless capitalism kills Black people,” Yasiin Bey told SPIN elsewhere in the interview. “This music has given young people in our community a dangerous road map, and at the end of it, if you don’t end up in some sort of trouble or grave, you may just end up a f*ckin’ nut.”
Bey and Kweli walked the line between insightful hip-hop commentary and Afrocentric empowerment on records like “Definition”, “Thieves in The Night”, and “Brown-Skin Lady”. Critics quickly fell in love with Black Star as a duo, acting as a counterbalance to the rise of gangsta rap and the mainstream at large. “The rhymes are the selling point. But the subculture that cares most about these words is what you’ll come back to,” writer Robert Christgau shared at the time.
After their debut album, Yasiin Bey and Talib Kweli informally disbanded Black Star and pursued the solo careers they had always wanted. While Bey would eventually vanish from the industry over time, Kweli remained a constant in the underground hip-hop scene. The pair would eventually reunite decades later in 2022 with their album No Fear of Time.
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