Combining the musicality and warmth of vintage Native Tongues with the urgency and moral leadership of KRS-One and Public Enemy, Black Star's self-titled debut and Mos Def's Black On Both Sides established Def as the embodiment of hip-hop's boundless potential, the prize pupil destined for greatness. Then something curious happened: Def became a fixture in pop culture, but he stopped releasing albums. He conquered film, television, commercials, Def Poetry, and the Broadway stage, but limited his recording career to the occasional guest appearance. Not surprisingly, the Darwinian nature of the record industry played a role in Def's absence. First, alt-rap standard-bearer Rawkus went out of business right before it was set to release a Mos Def-intensive fourth installment in its auspicious Soundbombing series. Then its parent company, MCA, shut its doors.
Five years after Black On Both Sides comes The New Danger, a sprawling mess recorded largely with producer Minnesota and with Black Jack Johnson, a supergroup teaming Def with Doug Wimbish, Gary Miller, Will Calhoun, and P-Funk synth master Bernie Worrell. On Both Sides' "Rock N Roll," Def re-claimed rock as black music, a process he continues here by inhabiting the crossroads where rock, blues, soul, funk, and hip-hop meet and intermingle until there's no telling where one ends and the next begins. On the epic jam "Blue Black Jack" (with guest Shuggie Otis and a wanky guitar solo), Mos Def reinvents himself as a 21st-century bluesman. The most audacious song on an album full of them, "The Rape Over" jacks the producer (Kanye West), the beat, and the aggression of Jay-Z's "Takeover" while subverting and negating its message. The alpha male of the Roc dynasty might like to think he and Nas are wrestling for control of hip-hop, but Def impolitely reminds everyone where the real power lies: with white men in offices, not the black men in videos.
At its best, The New Danger wields musical simplicity and swaggering sexuality like a sledgehammer, charting a musical path back to the Mississippi Delta through old-school hip-hop and Marvin Gaye's messianic soul symphonies. At his worst, Def seems to rebel not just against purism and the straitjacket of genre, but also against musicality, cohesion, his own pop instincts, beats, and rhymes. Def has always been the kind of artist who takes huge steps with each new album, but for much of The New Danger, that latest step walks him off a cliff.