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Black Star Meets Again
New York magazine
|May 9-22, 2022
Can lightning strike twice? How about 24 years later?
WE’VE BEEN WAITING on a second Black Star album since the Clinton administration. The fact that No Fear of Time now exists is incredible. The mission for the first album, Mos Def & Talib Kweli Are Black Star (1998), was to generate buzz for the duo who made it. It introduced Yasiin Bey (then known as Mos Def) and Talib Kweli as young philosophers and budding radicals. Luring you in with prodigious mic skills, the pair sent you away with homework, referencing seminal books, films, albums, and thinkers that listeners could track down in their free time. The two Brooklyn rappers hoped it would build a foundation for their future solo releases, but something else happened: Every time they linked up after that, fans of their collaboration thirsted anew for a sequel.
Kweli and Bey, born Dante Smith, got to know each other in the early ’90s, freestyling in Manhattan’s Washington Square Park and appearing at the same local spoken-word events. Fast friends, they had started making music together by 1997 and a year later dropped their album
This story is from the May 9-22, 2022 edition of New York magazine.
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