But I was always into music, so when hip hop got into a phase where it started sampling heavy, it was also the time I was in Junior High School and I wanted to do what the cool kids did… I think hip hop was just the perfect solution for me in that moment in my life.”įast forward to 1998 and hip hop was still reeling from the murders of 2Pac and The Notorious B.I.G., incidents which had been seen as the tragic yet inevitable end product of gangsta rap’s glorification of gun crime. “My parents were academics so we used to go to museums and libraries. I was into it as an outsider – I wasn’t breakdancing, I didn’t write graffiti, but the music was on the radios and the streets and the graffiti was on the walls and on the trains,” Kweli said. “Growing up in New York I was just surrounded by hip-hop culture.

And a hip hop sensibility had been forged as he grew up through a combination of knowledge and politics from his academic parents, and the flourishing hip hop culture of the time. Kweli had been born 23 years previous in Brooklyn, 1975. The Black Star album – and particularly its first single ‘Definition’ – put Kweli and Mos Def on the rap map. Mos Def & Talib Kweli are Black Star (Rawkus, 1998) These are the instances where the music and the artist’s life outside it came together in a way that has helped inform and inspire his listeners. Respected by his peers for his restive sense of invention and the technical complexity of both his writing and his delivery, Kweli has made a platform for himself, and he has lent the weight of his reputation to a number of social and political causes.

Nevertheless, from his earliest records the Brooklyn native has written incisively about the world around him and has never held back from speaking out on equality and injustice. It’s hard to say for certain when Talib Kweli first began to be called a ‘political rapper’, but it’s never been a label he’s accepted.įrom his emergence in the late 1990s as part of a new wave of underground hip-hop artists presenting a back-to-the-roots alternative to the conspicuous consumption of the gangsta/playa mainstream, Kweli’s art has been far more about skills and creative development than about anything as limited or as didactic as sloganeering.

Hip Hop historian Angus Batey pulls together a timeline of Talib Kweli’s most important releases and reveals the battles he was fighting in the gaps. But it’s the moments around these milestones that reveal something about the artist at the heart of the output. Releases are the tent pegs of any musician’s career.

Talib kweli songs