[A couple of years ago, when Yasiin Bey fka Mos Def announced that he was "retiring", I was inspired to write a blog about my path of hip hop appreciation and how important he was to that path. I never really finished it, but it turns it he never really retired either, so we're even. Inspired by a conversation with friends who had planned to attend a Mos concert with me this weekend before it was postponed due to you-know-what, I've decided to post the part that I did complete. Enjoy.]

My first favorite rapper was Too $hort.

I made this declaration of “sin dependence” in 1990 as a relatively sheltered 8th grader who knew who NWA was but had never been granted an in-depth study into the precise nature of the “Attitudes” of said “Niggaz”. But New Orleans was just raunchy enough to play $hort Dog on the radio, right between 2 Live Crew and our homegrown bounty of bounce-biggadee-bounce debauchery. (To wit: “Triiiiiick, stop tellin’ dat lie / We done hitcha from the back for some Popeye’s / You got a three-piece white, a small cold drink / Some red beans, a biscuit, and small fries . .” – Juvenile, “Bounce For The Juvenile”) And even radio versions couldn’t mask the candor and comedy of one Todd $haw, from “I Ain’t Trippin’” to “$hort Dog’s In The House”. Mine mild-mannered middle school mind was scandalized by the confidence of his boasts and the frankness of his sexuality. I was never to be the same. And ain’t that the whole point of art? (“Ain’t nothin’ like a Too $hort fan / I ain’t trippin’; you could play it again . .” – $hort Dog, “$hort Dog’s In The House”)

My parents pretty much offered me two options for high school. There was Ben Franklin (or, as the locals called it, “Dat School Where Dem Smart Kids Go”), just about the most accolade-laden public school in the city. And there was Saint Augustine, that sterling home of the Purple Knights, that fabled Catholic grooming house for upstanding and respectable African-American young men. Maybe I figured chicks would dig the uniform because I opted for the latter, as unbeknownst as my parents no doubt were as to the education in abject hoodlum-hood which I would actually receive in the hallowed halls of St. Aug. And the soundtrack of said skullduggery included the likes of Spiggity-Spice 1 the East Bay Gangsta and Ganksta Nip the South Park Psycho.

When I got over the shock appeal of my freshman year’s horrorcore offerings, I “matured” into the crass cleverness of Brand Nubian’s Grand Puba. To this day, I’m pretty sure his comic timing, playful creativity, and knack for referencing everything from 70’s soul lyrics to Martin Lawrence quotes have wafted into my own flow.

But it was in my junior year that this hip hop astronaut got caught in the orbit of the planet of Brooklyn; more ensconced than imprisoned, never to emerge from the urge.

No disrespect to Queens. I know who gave us the Trinity: the Instinctive Travels, the Infamous, and the holy Illmatic. But of the sacrosanct scriptures of 90s hip hop, Illmatic was not the Bible. It was just the book of Genesis. Many other sage seers of gritty spitty would follow the Pharoah Nastradamus. And of these profound prophets of rock-rockin-it, the ones who spoke most passionately and personally to me all seemed to speak Brooklyn. Brother Buckshot and Saints Smif-n-Wessun. The deacons of the Digable Planets and the righteous Reverend Ol’ Dirty Bastard. The venerable Jeru Da Damaja (“Can’t Stop The Prophet”) and AZ the Visualiza (“wise as Elijah”). And of course, the most sturdy of the clergy: Archbishop Biggie Smallz.

At this point, it kind of goes without saying that the one called The Notorious B.I.G. changed rap. In any case, finer journalistic fingertips than mine have clattered across keyboards to pronounce paeans of praise for the wherewithal (or should I say “The What”) of one Mr. Wallace.

But since hip hop put the “u” in “universal”, this is the part where I get to say how Biggie Smallz changed me.

I have a whole ‘nother rather fun blog waiting in the wings about how rather unfun high school was for me, so I’ll spare you the gory details for the nonce. Suffice to say when you’re 16 and feeling out of place in every place, comfort can come from some surprising places. Such as in the words:

“Biggie Smallz is the wickedness / Niggas say I’m pussy? I dare you to stick your dick in this / If I was pussy, I’d be full of syphilis / Herpes, gonorrhea, chlamydia, gettin’ ridda ya . .” – Biggie Smallz, “Mister Cee Freestyle”

The Gospel of Do-or-Die Bed-Stuy. Amen.

I think a big part of the high school experience is the realization that caring hurts. It hurts to care about keeping your grades on the up-and-up when realistically they go up-and-down. It hurts to care about your self-image when it gets tested even more frequently than the academics (and often with far fewer opportunities for make-ups and extra credit). And it hurts to care about girlfriends and boyfriends. If I have to explain why, you must have never had one.

But through his nicely-phrased nihilism, Biggie the Beneficent blessed me with the vestments of being uninvested. He introduced me to the magical emancipation of quite simply not giving the fuck. And through his asinine alchemy of asphalt and assholatry, the livest one from Bedford-Stuyvesant ironically enough turned an album called Ready To Die into a living masterpiece.

And yet, halfway through my college career, I would find myself needing more than Biggie. Partly because that’s when I would lose him.

We all did. You know the story. 1997. Sing along if you know the words: “The greatest rapper of all time died on March 9th . .” – Canibus, “2nd Round K.O.” I remember being in Rankin Chapel at my beloved Howard University on that fateful Sunday morning when guest preacher Reverend Michael Eric Dyson broke the news as part of his sermon. I wasn’t the only one in the pews exchanging dropped-jaw looks of shock at this news. You might say we were . . hypnotized.

I’m not quite nostalgic enough to call Biggie the best who ever did it. True, no one before or really even since could do it for the radio, the clubs, and the streets, for the thugs, the ladies, and those pretentiously-critical hip hop snobs known as “backpackers” (guess which one I was? Hint: I was never a thug), quite like the black Frank White here to excite. But with his career so tragically cut short, I just don’t think it’s fully fair to compare him to others who had the opportunity to do more with their careers (such as live long enough to retire from them, and even come back from retirement). However, I will admit that the loss of B-I-G-P-O-P-P-A-with-no-info-for-the-D-E-A left a hole in mine hip hop heart which was too, well, “big” to be refilled with another rapper.

So I would need two.

Nasir Jones had proven himself prolific with his classic debut, but his sophomore release found him introducing this “Escobar” character, a move which I saw as mildly diluting the purity of his poetics in ways which I found to be unnecessary and ultimately somewhat disappointing.

No. If I was going to go “gangsta”, I was going to go there with a cat who had only ever been that. And Brooklyn was all-too-ready with Biggie’s heir apparent.

“I dip; spit quicker than you’ve ever seen / Administer pain; now the minister’s screaming your name / At your wake as I peek in / Look in your casket, feeling sarcastic; look at him, still sleeping . .” – Jay-Z, “22 2’s”

That Nigga Jigga had raised my eyebrow with “In My Lifetime (Remix)”, wowed me with “Dead Presidents”, and won me with his debut album Reasonable Doubt. He satisfied my food groups for cleverness, confidence, and that all-important Vitamin (I Don’t Give A) F. He weren’t Biggie, but he’d do.

Yet something had happened to me at Howard. (Ain’t that the whole point of college?) My latent black consciousness, first hinted at when I read Native Son and The Autobiography of Malcolm X in high school, had been fully awakened at the Mecca. By my junior year, Assata Shakur and Dr. Francis Cress Welsing had gotten to me. I was turning 20 and realizing I wanted to greet that birthday with a broader insight than Nas had when he told us “life’s a bitch and then you die”. Don’t get me wrong; I still partied my ass off. Bad Boy and No Limit (and later Ruff Ryders and Cash Money) saw to that. But I had also become a poet in my own right; intensely sensitive with a penchant for penmanship. The artist in me needed my music to give me more than just cocksure bravado and materialistic Mafioso fantasies (as much fun as those still were).

And that’s when “the thoroughest borough” shined upon me once again. Against the canvas of the night. With a curious celestial phenomenon.

A Black Star.

“One, two, three / Mos Def and Talib Kweli / We came to rock it on to the tip top / Best alliance in hip hop . . Y-O / I said one, two, three / It’s kind of dangerous to be an emcee / They shot Tupac and Biggie / Too much violence in hip hop . . Y-O . .” – Black Star, “Definition”

From my first listen, I identified Talib Kweli as an emcee’s emcee. He could straight up rap his ass off. The Native Tongue connection was clear in his delivery, but one could even skip over them and see where he (and quite likely they) had studied nimbleness of flow, clarity of diction and readiness to educate from the likes of Queen Latifah, Rakim, and KRS-ONE. Kweli was a true “Spitkicker”. And I respected him as that.

But this Mos Def character?

Oh, he was something more.

He was an artist’s artist.

The dude could sing. The dude could kick poetry. The dude could act. Oh, and oh yeah, the dude could rap.

To spit, even to spit extremely slickly, was never enough for Mos. To each track which his voice caressed, Mos brought this hypnotic harmony, this spoken word sensibility, this certain . . . what the French call “je ne sais quoi”. I once heard Maxwell refer to the voice as an instrument. If ‘tis true, I’ve never heard any hip hop artist use that instrument more beautifully than Black Dante from Myrtle and Broadway, whose jazz riff scat-spit antics hath made every song both his lover and child in the sanctimonious sinfulness of their instrumental incest.

My favorite Black Star song to this day is “Respiration”. My skin still literally tingles when I hear shorty say “¡Escuchala! La ciudad respirando . .” as the beat comes in. Perhaps the tingling comes from the city, thus sung, doing just that; breathing on the hairs of my arms and the nape of my neck. You’ll have to ask H.E.R. (Holy Entity of Respiration.) Speaking of H.E.R., when arguing who had the best verse, one might lobby for Com, who shined with: “My circumstance is between Cabrini and Love Jones / Surrounded by hate, yet I love home . .”. And one could provide a strong case for King Kweli, who jeweled us with: “It’s a paradox we call reality / Where keeping it real will make you a casualty of abnormal normality . .”

But Mos? All he had to say to win the song for me was: “Weeee-do-wee-daw-aw-aw-awwwww-aw-awwwwww-aw-aw-awwwwwwwww!”

See what I mean? Shit ain’t even fair! Shit ain’t even words! How you compare a cat with other rappers when his very voice is music?

And scarier still, he was just getting started.