The Ecstatic
In an essay in What the Dog Saw, Malcolm Gladwell asserts that there are two types of geniuses, signified by Picasso and Cézanne. Picasso was what you might call a “conceptual” genius. At an early age, he had a very clear idea of what he wanted to accomplish as an artist, and he did exactly that. In fact, Gladwell sites examples of Picasso scoffing at things like research and experimentation. Cézanne, on the other hand, was a late bloomer. As a painter, he spent years trying to reach the ideal he set out for himself in his head. Ultimately, he succeeded in creating a style that laid the groundwork for Picasso’s, but not until relatively late in his career. “The kind of creativity that proceeds through trial and error,” says Gladwell, “necessarily takes a long time to come to fruition.” Gladwell’s larger point is that Cézanne’s type of genius—the experimental type—is just as valid as Picasso’s; it simply requires more time and care to nurture it. But what about a mind that contains both conceptual and experimental genius? Would that person begin his career with a clear idea of what he wanted to accomplish, achieve it, and then get lost in the woods for years before achieving another, new kind of ideal? Mos Def’s The Ecstatic makes a pretty great case for its creator doing just that.
At the turn of the century, Mos Def’s work on Mos Def and Talib Kweli are Black Star, and his debut solo album, Black on Both Sides, helped establish a baseline for underground rap in the 00’s. The years following the release of Black on Both Sides, however, were rife with sketchy decisions—forming a rock band called Black Jack Johnson, trying to fill Don Cheadle’s shoes on Broadway, phoning in a full album for Geffen, then releasing that album without a cover, starring in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In 2005, I made the trip up to Providence, RI, to see Mos Def. After standing ten feet from the stage for three and a half hours’ worth of openers*, I left ten minutes into Mos Def’s set. Dude wasn’t even rapping; he was, like, singing, sort of, in hushed tones and a fake patois.
The Ecstatic is more than a comeback album; it’s a synthesis of all the weird-ass shit Mos Def has done the last ten years that somehow, against all odds, makes it all work. (Well, all of it except Ford Prefect, maybe.) It opens with a lightly-touched reworking of Turkish singer/guitarist Selda Bağcan’s “Ince Ince” by producer Oh No, which sets the stage for an album as global as anything since Malcolm McLaren’s Duck Rock. Though he drops some of his best rhymes in years—particularly on early single “Life in Marvelous Times”—Mos generally takes on the more traditional role of the emcee, leading The Ecstatic through a mix of mid-Eastern samples (like Ihsan al Munze’s “The Joy of Lima” for “The Embassy”), snatches of political speeches (Fela Kuti’s introduction to “Quiet Dog”), and telling guest spots from other possible conceptual experimentalists Slick Rick and Talib Kweli. And, yeah, he sings—but it’s always in service of moving the show along, a trick pulled from Erland Øye’s DJ Kicks contribution. Ultimately, The Ecstatic is one of the most surprising albums of the year—both because of its mixed-bag content, and because we rarely see years of frustrating experimentation pay off this exquisitely.
-Martin Brown, 2009
*In fairness, the openers were K’Naan, Jean Grae, Pharoahe Monch, and Talib Kweli.
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