When it takes you five years to follow up a debut of near-landmark stature, you're setting yourself up for failure.
Mos Def's second solo album is not disastrous, but it's a sprawling, overambitious mess. A handful of songs from this 75-minute affair feature
Black Jack Johnson, the
rock band
Mos set up with some very respected musicians: bassist
Doug Wimbish (
Sugar Hill house band,
Living Colour), drummer
Will Calhoun (
Living Colour), guitarist
Dr. Know (
Bad Brains), and keyboardist
Bernie Worrell (
Parliament/
Funkadelic). While that's a deadly cast of support, those guests seem to have gone into this inspired more by the negligible
rap-meets-
rock Judgment Night soundtrack than their own past work. The grooves and riffs are basic (of the dull variety), and the vocals rarely surpass echo-heavy shouts of "Let's go!" "Come with it!" and "F*ck you, pay me!" As poor as those songs are, the lowest point of the album is
"The Rape Over," a rewrite of
Jay-Z's
"The Takeover" that jacks
Kanye West's beat from same that, for all its sharp rage, is ruined by the line "Quasi-homosexuals is running this rap sh*t" (it's not a boast). Unsurprisingly, the hottest moments tend to come when
Mos sticks to what he does best. One slight exception to this is
"Modern Marvel," a nine-minute suite smeared with a series of
Marvin Gaye samples.
Mos sings in whispers (he makes
Pharrell sound like
Luther, but he has the required spirit), momentum floats in as easy as a light breeze, and then the MC shifts into goosepimple-raising mode. Throughout the whole thing,
Mos Def's conviction is apparent. Even with that in his favor, in addition to considering the extra-genre dabblings on
Black on Both Sides,
The New Danger sounds confused. It should've taken
Mos at least three more records for him to reach this state of restless aimlessness. What grates most is that
Q-Tip's
Kamaal the Abstract, the best out of the rash of horizon-broadening records from
rap artists the past few years, remains unreleased. ~ Andy Kellman
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