JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Yasiin Bey’s 51st birthday.
Tag: Yasiin Bey/Mos Def
Throwback: Happy (Belated) 52nd Birthday, DMX!
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms belatedly celebrates the 52nd anniversary of DMX’s birth.
Throwback: Black History Month: Mos Def/Yasiin Bey
Today is the third day of Black History Month. And if you’ve been frequenting this site over the past few days of this month, you’d see that I’ve been featuring Black artists across a wide and eclectic array of genres and styles that I think can guide you towards understanding the Black experience.
Through the month — and throughout the year, I hope that you’ll come to understand and appreciate the following:
Black culture is American culture
Black music is American music.
Black history is American history.
America’s greatest and beloved contributions to the world are Black music styles — the blues, jazz, rock ‘n’ roll and hip-hop.
Black art matters.
You can’t love black art and black artists without loving black people.
Black lives matter — all of them, all of the time.
Mos Def (now known as Yasiin Bey) recorded one of the most important and relevant albums of my life, an album I turn to whenever racism and its ugly head rears its head in my life — Black on Both Sides. If you’ve had the chance to get to know me in real life, it wouldn’t be surprising that for the first JOVM DJ set, I ended the set with “Umi Says,” one of my favorite songs off that album. Also, the man in my opinion is one of the greatest living emcees, ever.
With the release of 2006’s full-length debut Olessi: Fragments of an Earth released through Stones Throw Records, the Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter, musician and producer Georgia Anne Muldrow quickly established herself as a key member of her hometown’s avant-garde hip-hop/jazz/soul scene; in fact, while on Stones Throw Records, Muldrow befriended and collaborated with Madlib, Oh No, MED, Wild Child, DJ Romes and her future partner Dudley Perkins, also known as Declaime.
Along with Perkins, Muldrow co-founded SomeOthaShip Connect Records in 2008 and through their label, the Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter, musician and producer released forward-thinking, genre-defying material under a number of monikers and including Ms. One, Pattie Blingh & The Akebulan 5, Blackhouse, an electro fusion project with DJ Romes and the critically renowned jazz project Jyoti, which garnered Jazz Album of the Year honors at Gilles Peterson’s Worldwide Awards back in 2011 for Ocotea. Since then Muldrow has developed a reputation as a musician’s musician, who has been praised and championed by Yasiin Bey, Bilal, Erykah Badu with whom she collaborated of Badu’s New Amerykah Part Two and Robert Glasper, with whom she collaborated with on the Miles Ahead soundtrack.
Fittingly, Muldrow signed with Brainfeeder Records and her first Brainfeeder release is the Mike & Keys-produced “Overload,” a somewhat anxious yet swooning track centered around a slick and retro-futuristic and soulful production featuring stuttering beats, arpeggiated keys and an infectious hooked paired with Muldrow’s effortlessly soulful, Erykah Badu-like vocals — and while being clearly indebted to the neo-soul sound of the late 90s and early 00s, the song is about “the process of building loving relationships in spite of the malfunctions of Western Society.”