During a current interview with Audible, Yasiin Bey mentioned his early profession. The interview was a part of a sequence of interviews in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of hip hop. Yasiin Bey, previously referred to as Mos Def, revealed that he struggled to search out different artists that had been doing what he was seeking to do on the time. He shares that he was in a position to join his personal artwork to De La Soul’s, which he defined wasn’t frequent. The artist is at the moment making his manner across the United States with Erykah Badu on her “Unfollow Me” tour.
“Watching the world just be on fire, you know,” Yasiin Bey explains, “Or at least, my community, with the crime and the drugs.” He continues, “And there was a very indifferent attitude towards what was happening to us, too — there was no telethons for crack babies. So I was like, this popular cultural narrative isn’t working for anybody, you know?”
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Yasiin Bey Discusses His Early Influences
“So much got lost getting the game that it wasn’t working. So I started writing, just about what I was seeing, and about what I felt. And my brother, God bless him […] we used to watch TV. Video Music Box,” Yasiin Bey continues, “And Common‘s ‘Easy’ came on from Can I Borrow A Dollar? And my brother was like, ‘We can do this!’ So he just started making connects with local talent shows. And a year or two later, lo and behold, I got the deal.”
“As a teenager, though, it was a lot for me,” the artist goes on, “Because at the time I was listening to just as much Miles Davis as I was Rakim and De La Soul. I was even interested in Jimi Hendrix, and Bad Brains, and all that shit. […] But thank God for De La Soul. Because, apart from them […] I just had a different expression, something different that I wanted to see that I wasn’t seeing.”
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