The Fluoroscope of Brooklyn Hip Hop: Talib Kweli in Conversation

"I believe Hip Hop is theater . . . The way we act. We create characters. We tell stories. We direct. We write the script. We perform it. We do all that."

—Talib Kweli

Face to face, Talib Kweli is a theatric, philosophic Hip Hop being. If Flaubert is the magician of language, and Larry Neal and Sonia Sanchez are word sorcerers, then Kweli is definitely the eternal reflector of Hip Hop Nation language. To state it more precisely, Talib Kweli is the fluoroscope that shows us why the Black Star hovers over Brooklyn. Green light in Park Slope. Yellow lights in Bed-Stuy. Black light flashing on and off in Flatbush. Narrow streets. Night voices turn corners as the street lights point to blackhearted black holes. Widow at midday. Bruknam at Midnight. Pagan Spain and Pastoral Knights marching like Pastor Troy over some Brooklyn Bridge with a platoon of Universal Souljahs of Truth. Night specter. Just when they'd given up hope, a follicle of Hip Hop foliage signals new life.

Talib: "I feel like I need to bring a balance to Hip Hop. I feel like that's what I'm gonna do, and anybody who's along those lines of thought, you're gonna hear their influences in my work, whether it's a Marcus Garvey or a Malcolm X. I'm not trying to go back in the past, but I'm living in the now. The future and the past is just an extension of the now!" In re-examining the brilliant artistry of the rapper, Talib Kweli, my mind rushes back once again to the Poet-Teacher-Seer, Dr. Kamau Brathwaite. He says, "In response to the entire Revolution and chiefly, perhaps, out of the need to explain to self and others what was taking place, there emerged the creative critics: Lewis, Wynter, Rohlehr, Maxwell, and Best, who are no longer concerned with colonial despair, with our having 'nothing,' our 'exile,' but with a total roots-directed (re)definition of ourselves an aesthetic: word, act, vision, value system." Is that not what Talib Kweli offers us in Quality, Black Star and Eternal Reflection?

On The Move From Park Slope to Flatbush

Talib Kweli is the son of college professors Dr. Perry Greene and Dr. Brenda H. Greene. Born in the upper-middle-class Park Slope section of Brooklyn, he early evinced an interest in his rich and diverse Pan African cultural heritage. He recalls, "I grew up near Prospect Park in Brooklyn, New York. Played a lot of baseball. That's what my childhood was about, baseball. I wasn't into music. First part of my childhood, I was in a neighborhood that was very integrated. Lots of Puerto Rican kids, Dominican kids, White kids, Black kids. It's called Park Slope in Brooklyn. Then when I was in junior high school, I moved to a West Indian neighborhood, Flatbush." Turning to a discussion of his parents, Kweli says, "I think all Black people in the country are Africanized to a certain extent. I think we still have things that stay with us from our heritage, certain values and ideas. I think my parents . . . I definitely think they tapped into it, that's why they gave me my name."

After giving him his name (Talib = truth-seeker) and habitation (Brooklyn), it was left to this young, inquisitive Black man to learn how to navigate those mean, super-activated, and alluring streets of urban America. This is a new day for a new people. Gone is the world his mother and father grew up in. Just as his father was a Bopman (an initiate of Max Roach's, Dizzy Gillespie's, Charlie Parker's and Thelonius Monk's bebop world), Talib is a product of the Hip Hop Cultural Revolution.

The Narrative Power of Slick Rick

At the very moment Talib became more immersed in the social, political, and cultural world around him, his Hip Hop consciousness took shape. He describes it like this: "I started being interested in the social scene. Before that I was...