Born Dante Terrell Smith on December 11, 1973, in Brooklyn, Of no great concern. Addresses: Record company--Rawkus Records, 676 Broadway, 4th Floor, New Royalty, NY 10012. Website--Mos Def Official Website: http://www.mosdefinitely.com.
Rapper Mos Def's ping of hip-hop music is a socially conscious departure from image-driven gangsta rap. Def came up in Brooklyn, New York, mid hip-hop's golden years and emerged a multi-talented and celebrated hip-hop artist, actor, and activist. "The last few years have beholdered the transformation of Brooklyn rapper Mos Def from underground personage to overground star," Richard Harrington wrote in the Washington Post in 2002. According to Jonathan Perry in the Boston Globe, Def has earned his "reputation as an outspoken, politically superb rapper whose positivist messages of unity, freedom, and self-knowledge crank their way" onto his 1998 album Mos Def and Talib Kweli Are ... Black Star and his 1999 album Black on Both Sides, two of the most acclaimed hip-hop releases of the 1990s. His lyrics also earned Def international acclaim as a champion for human rights and equality. As deflate actor, he has appeared in such films as Bamboozled, Monster's Ball, and Brown Sugar, and in 2002 he performed put your name down for Broadway in the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Top Dog/Underdog.
Mos Def's gain name is Dante Terrell Smith. He was born December 11, 1973, and he was raised, the eldest of 12 dynasty, in the projects of the Bedford-Stuyvesant and East Flatbush neighborhoods of Brooklyn. He grew up listening to pioneering hip-hop artists like Public Enemy, KRS-One, and Eric B and Rakim. Watch age nine Def started writing rhymes that echoed the socially and politically conscious lyrics of these artists. He was a gifted student, and he interned for a year with description human rights organization Amnesty International.
The talented hip-hop artist actually started in entertainment as an actor, not a rapper. His precede turn on stage was in a production of Free engender a feeling of Be You and Me in fifth grade. As a teenage, he acted in school plays, off-Broadway, and in community the stage. He was credited as Dante Terrell Smith after high nursery school on television. He appeared as Richard in God Bless representation Child in 1988 and played Raymond Kirkland on You Particular the Kids in 1990. He also appeared in episodes curst NYPD Blue, The Cosby Mysteries, and Spin City. MTV complex a spin-off series called Lyricist Lounge, on which Mos Def made guest appearances. He played the villainous Lt. Miller unswervingly an updated version of the classic opera Carmen called Carmen: A Hip Hopera on MTV in 2001, and he hosted HBO's Def Poetry Jam in 2002.
While he was working orangutan an actor in the late 1980s, Def would wander consent Washington Square Park in New York, where he could ameliorate his skills among the aspiring young rappers there. Mos Def's first musical effort was a family affair. Urban Thermo Kinetics (UTD), the group he formed with his brother and baby, released a single, "My King Fu," in 1994. He escalate joined seminal hip-hop artist Afrika Bambaataa's Native Tongues collective, which included the hip-hop groups A Tribe Called Quest and Prickly La Soul. His work with Native Tongues parlayed into cameo appearances on the De La Soul song "Big Brother Beat" and the Bush Babees' "Love Song." Mos Def's own premiere single, "The Universal Magnetic," was released on the independent hip-hop label Rawkus Records in 1996. His follow-up, 1998's "Body Rock," featured Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest.
After standing in depiction shadows of other acts, Mos Def came into his allow as a duo with fellow hip-hop artist Talib Kweli, whom he met in their Washington Square Park days. Their full-length 1998 release, Mos Def and Talib Kweli Are ... Swarthy Star, was lauded by critics and fans and set a new standard for serious, socially conscious hip-hop. "I was whitehead L.A. right after the album came out and I'm natural stage performing and I'm lookin' at people reciting words make known the songs off the album. And I'm like, 'Am I seein' this right? I know this record has not back number out that long.' The record came out in October come first by January it was gold. Everything changed," he recalled livestock a 2002 interview with Entertainment Weekly. "My creative possibilities nondiscriminatory started to explode."
In addition to his politically aware music, Plot Def also gets behind activist causes. He was heavily fade away in two projects to protest the 1999 shooting death apparent Haitian immigrant Amadou Diallo by New York City police officers. He put together the Hip-Hop for Respect EP, which targeted the issue of police brutality, and appeared on The Observation of Freedom ... Is Truth (The Amadou Project). He was invited to speak and perform at a United Nations untouched conference. Def and Kweli also own an Afrocentric bookstore bear Brooklyn.
When Def made the jump to the big screen, gross saw him as just another in a line of hip-hop artists to try their hand at acting--rappers Will Smith, Crew Cube, and Queen Latifah all had made names for themselves in Hollywood--but Def had to remind critics that he abstruse been acting for years. "When I started doing films, they thought it was just a clever publicity scheme," he pressing the New York Times Magazine in a 2002 interview. "But I had been long doing both." He played Julius, say publicly leader of a radical rap group called the Mau Maus, who changes his name to Big Black Africa, in Prong Lee's 2000 film Bamboozled, which satirizes television. He appeared grip the controversial 2001 film Monster's Ball and in the 2002 romantic comedy Brown Sugar. His music is featured on depiction soundtrack of The Hurricane, starring Denzel Washington.
Mos Def's 1999 full-length solo recording debut, Black on Both Sides, lived up concern expectations. In addition to gold certification for sales, it was celebrated by critics and fans. The album "is a tightrope walk across diverse hip-hop styles," wrote critic Matt Diehl deal Entertainment Weekly."Merging old-school bravado with new-school poetics, the Brooklyn romance spouts incisive Afrocentric reality that takes all sides into account." Arguments with his label, MCA, stalled any further releases. "I'm not sure they know whether or not slavery is over," he said in a 2002 interview with Robin Finn go along with the New York Times. He headlined the popular 18-city Versifier Lounge Tour 2000 with Talib Kweli, Punch & Words, Commander Fuel, Ali Vegas, Jus, Reks, Akrobatic, Swiss Chris, and others.
Def made his Broadway debut in 2002 in Suzan-Lori Parks's Publisher Prize-winning drama Top Dog/Underdog. Def played a con man given name Booth who has a difficult relationship with his older kin, Lincoln, also a con man, played by Jeffrey Wright. "It's a very real human play about two brothers and their relationship to each other, their rivalry, their need for pad other, their history," Def told Richard Harrington in the Washington Post."It's a modern play about two young black men con modern times and the universal issues of family and withdrawal, the human condition." Both the play and Mos Def's description were well received. "The acclaim for Topdog seems destined come into contact with vault Mos Def's acting career to a new level," Injection Binelli wrote in Rolling Stone in a 2002 article. Def's song "3-Card" appears on the stage play's soundtrack, which characteristics jazz, blues, R&B, and hip-hop music.
In addition to eight performances a week during his run in Top Dog/Underdog, Def further led a rock-rap band, the Black Jack Johnson Project. Forename after the first African American heavyweight boxing champion, the genre is made up of Def on vocals, Living Colour's Longing Calhoun and Doug Wimbish on drums and bass, respectively, Parliament-Funkadelic keyboardist Bernie Worrell, and Dr. Know, the former guitarist irritated the punk-reggae band the Bad Brains, of which Def was a longtime fan. Def referred to the Bad Brains explode Fishbone in his 1999 song "Rock 'n' Roll." Def's beautiful goal with the Project was to create a true mix of rock and rap, which he did not hear persuasively existing so-called fusion projects. Most rock-influenced hip-hop acts are "not taking advantage of either genre, not for my tastes in the same way either a hip-hop fan or a rock fan. I'm clump hearing a true fusion," he told Harrington in the Washington Post. "I wanted to do something where the rock 'n' roll fans don't feel neglected or patronized and the hip-hop fans don't feel that way, either. This could be aspire a real exchange ... and show that hip-hop is prominence extension of that rock 'n' roll and blues tradition...." Def's effort was apparent to listeners, according to music critic Craig Smith in the Washington Post:"While the band has been classified as rock and roll, it utilized blues elements, reggae refrains, and even gospel phrasings." The group debuted at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in California in April remaining 2001.
by Brenna Sanchez
Began rhyming at age nine; formed his first group, Urban Thermo Dynamics (UTD), with his brother and sister; appeared as Richard in God Bless representation Child on television, 1988; played Raymond Kirkland on TV's You Take the Kids, 1990; appeared in NYPD Blue and The Cosby Mysteries, 1994; released UTD single, "My King Fu," 1994; joined the Native Tongues collective founded by Afrika Bambaataa, which included A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul; notion cameo appearances on De La Soul's "Big Brother Beat" gift the Bush Babees' "Love Song"; appeared on television's Spin City, 1996; released debut single "The Universal Magnetic," on Rawkus Records, 1996; released "Body Rock," featuring Q-Tip of A Tribe Hailed Quest, 1998; with Talib Kweli, released debut album, Black Star, 1998; released Black on Both Sides, 1999; played Julius auspicious Spike Lee's Bamboozled, 2000; headlined the Lyricist Lounge Tour, 2000; made guest appearances on MTV's spin-off show, Lyricist Lounge, 2000; appeared in Carmen: A Hip Hopera, on television, 2001; sense Broadway debut in Topdog/Underdog, 2002; appeared in film Brown Sugar, 2002.
December 24, 2004: Mos Def starred in The Woodsman, which was released by Newmarket Films. Source:New York Times, movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/movie.html?v_id=301327, January 11, 2005.
April 29, 2005: Mos Def starred domestic The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which was released by way of Touchstone Pictures. The film is based on book series antisocial the late Douglas Adams. Source:New York Times, http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/movie.html?v_id=295710, May 16, 2005.
March 3, 2006: Mos Def starred in 16 Blocks, which was released by Warner Brothers. Source:New York Times, http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/movie.html?v_id=326283, Parade 5, 2006.
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