Black Star: 5 things to know about the rap duo who reunite to perform on ‘SNL’ this week

“Hello It’s Me David Chapel🇧🇷 This week I’m a guest sl, featuring musical guests from Black Star in such a black episode, will be on BET! Dave said in one of the promos on November 12, Saturday night live🇧🇷 after laughing ego nwodim Y Black Star, Dave assured viewers that the show would air on NBC as planned. However, his other statement may be true considering the lyrical content woven into Black Star’s verses and rhymes.

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the duo- Talib Kweli Y Yassin Bey – are configured to run sl eight months after launch without fear of time, the long-awaited second album of the group. It’s been 24 years without fear of time and the group’s semi-self-titled debut, but this could be the first time millions of people have heard their music. without fear of time is exclusive to the podcast app Luminary🇧🇷 Bey and Kweli worked with Dave Capelle on his podcast, The Midnight Miraclein 2021. As of November 2022, it is not on any other streaming service.

(Prior to sl Luminary has announced the second season of its award-winning show The Midnight Miracle, hosted by Dave Chappelle, Yasiin Bey and Talib Kwei. “Season 2 full episodes will be released weekly through early 2023, and Luminary will announce the first episode release date in the coming days. Season 2 features live audience recordings in London and Amsterdam while Chappelle toured with Chris Rock, as well as sessions in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Click here for more detailed information.)

“It means artists get paid,” Kewi told NPR of putting the album on Luminary. “If you’re a true Black Star fan, then you’ll respect the fact that what made sense to us, business-wise, was to put you in Luminary and get paid no matter what happens in the music business.”

So with this being a great musical moment for many, here’s what you need to know about Black Star.

Black Star is a rap duo

Black Star is a rap duo made up of Talib Kweli and Yassin Bey (formerly Mos Def.) Bey and Kweli met through digits in New York’s Washington Square Park in the early 90’s. Open Mic Spoken Word. bey would join DCQ Y dogs to form Urban thermodynamicswhile Kweli made his first appearance in humor 1994 track, “Transforeify”. Bey and Kweli collaborated for “Freestyle” on All Music’s 1997 compilation Rawkus. A year later, they released Talib Kweli and Mos Def are Black Star. Although it was released on the same day as Jay Z vol. Two, by OutKast aquiminiY Mission of a tribe called The movement of love the album sold well and peaked at number 53 on board 200.

“The message of the Black Star album, the first, resonates now,” said Kewli. NPR in May 2022. “And we weren’t saying anything very different from, you know, people like it amiri baraka in the Black Arts movement and what Nina Simone he said onstage at the end of his career. We stand on the shoulders of our ancestors. The canon of black art is incredible and is the soul of all the great art coming out of America especially. Black people in America have been the moral compass, and we have been the ones to elevate the art, and we have been the ones to make the most unique American things.”

They were named after Marcus Garvey

“Black Star: We are named after the Honorable Marcus Garvey, a famous Jamaican immigrant who came to the United States and was looking to build ships, the Black Star Line, to bring Americans back to Africa,” Kewli said. NPR🇧🇷 🇧🇷[That] it is a kind of beginning of pan-Africanism and a push for reparations. So with Black Star, we always talk about hip-hop, pan-Africanism, spirituality, all these things that are necessary for the liberation of our people. And I think it’s time for us to come back now.”

Black Star is more than the sum of its parts

As for why it took over two decades for a follow-up album, Kweli and Bey kept busy. In 1999, Yassin Bey released his first solo album, black on both sidesa mainstay of late ’90s hip-hop (especially for backpackers and those watching beyond MTV at the time). Kweli and producer hi-tek published line of reasoning in 2000, and would soon establish himself as a lyricist’s lyricist.

“I have fun for my audience and I double my dollars,” sang Jay-Z on “Moment of Clarity,” from the 2003 album. The black album. ‘I get mad about this but everybody yells ‘holla’ / If skills were sold, truth be told, I’d probably be lyrically Talib Kweli / Honestly, I wanna rhyme like common sense / But I made 5 million’ – I’m not , no rhymes like Common since (Woo!)”

Kweli has been prolific, having released eight solo albums and as many collaborative albums since 2000. Bey would release a handful of albums, but his career in front of the camera would disrupt his musical flow. Appeared in films such as Monster’s Ball, The Italian Job, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Y 16 blocks.

The Black Star album almost didn’t come out

In 2018, Bey and Kweli teamed up for a surprise encounter at a Robert Glasper concert. In 2022 they performed alongside Robert Glasper, Dave Chappelle, thunder cat🇧🇷 flying lotusand more as the brand debuts at the Blue Note Napa Festival. And, in 2021, Kweli said they had the new record boxed, but it wasn’t going to come out.

“I did my best. He flew around the world. I paid for it out of pocket,” she wrote in a now-deleted IG post, according to Stereogum. “Everything for culture. I’m also a Black Star fan, I want it to be as bad as you guys or worse. But people who’ve never made a beat, never written a rhyme in their lives, have their fingers in the pie and disrespect what my brothers and I have built. Now it’s in God’s hands. I’m talking about other things, life is too short for culture vultures to be disrespectful. Maybe you can hear this album after I’m gone.”

His new album is due in part to Dave Chapelle

“About three or four years ago, I was visiting Yasiin in Europe and we started talking about songs to make into an album, so I called an engineer to see what it would look like,” Kweli said in a press release announcing without fear of time, by Stereogum. “Once I realized that this conversation was starting to organically morph into a creative conversation, I started having the engineer with me all the time. One day, we were in a hotel listening to Madlib’s beats, and he said, “Play that Madlib tape again.” I’m playing the beats and he starts rhyming with the beats. And that’s how we made the first song…”

“This is very similar to how we did the first album. But on the first album, there were no mobile studios,” he added. “Throughout this album, we haven’t set foot in a recording studio. It was all done in hotel rooms and backstage at Dave Chappelle shows.”