An honest appraisal of Talib Kweli
I can’t resist the chance to be honest about one of my least favourites.
Just to ever-so-viciously fuck with every rap nerd who may read this, here's a summary I gave the great secularist activists Melissa Chen and Lucas Lynch on Facebook back in 2017 when, having been attacked on Twitter (from which he has since been suspended, which serves the prick right, loth though I am to endorse limits on anyone’s freedom of speech) with his customary vituperation, they asked, “Who's Talib Kweli?”:
“Talib Kweli is a hugely famous, popular, respected, beloved, and influential indie rapper who's managed to sustain a long and storied career... despite being, in almost every case, genuinely bad at the actual act of rapping. With the possible exception of Kanye West (and perhaps Joe Budden if he counts), he's probably the least talented rapper of all those who have had genuinely legendary careers. (He has legions of passionate fans, but those people are all horribly wrong.)
Kweli's politics are an aggressive parody of the regressive Left; besides Lucas Lynch and Ali A. Rizvi, he's attacked the liberal Muslim activist Maajid Nawaz, the great Irish classical liberal writer Mark Humphrys, and numerous other sensible folks, including any and all ex-Muslims, Zionists, supporters of Western civilization, and secularists. (Kweli himself is a nondenominational theist and moderate Black nationalist; his dunderheadedness and cruelty are almost entirely choices he's made, ruining perfectly reasonable raw intellectual ingredients.)
Kweli is an affiliate of the legendary Native Tongues Posse, a collective including such immortal hip-hop royalty as De La Soul, Monie Love, Queen Latifah, Black Sheep, the Jungle Brothers, and A Tribe Called Quest. His big break came in 1998 alongside Mos Def in the duo Black Star. Mos Def has similarly terrible politics, but in contrast to Kweli (who has no real poetic sense and frequently falls off-beat), Mos Def is a supremely talented rap artist whose 1999 album Black On Both Sides is one of the masterpieces of the genre. Kweli also made a half-decent album with DJ Hi-Tek as Reflection Eternal, and was praised by the massively famous Jay-Z at the height of both men's careers – Jay went on record saying that “if skills sold, then truth be told, I'd [rap like] Talib Kweli.”
Over the years, Kweli has collaborated with superb artists like Kool G Rap, Busta Rhymes, Chali 2Na, Jean Grae, Kendrick Lamar, Joell Ortiz, David Banner, UGK, DJ Quik, Myka 9, E-40, Anderson .Paak, Xzibit, Rah Digga, and Brother Ali. Through it all, he's only seldom conjured a memorable image or crafted a witty punchline – as a rapper he is entirely a blunt instrument, with a weak flow and a grating voice. But he's considered one of rap's greats. It's quite unfortunate.”
Reflecting upon this missive in 2021, I have very little to add to it, except to note that I admit that this, this, this, this, and (especially) this are good songs, that he would probably make a decent executive producer of someone else’s albums (his song concepts are frequently at least interesting), and that he’s a huge dickhead for insulting the West Coast legends Project Blowed for the pettiest asshole reasons in the world. The diss tracks released by Blowed vets like Mister CR and the very underrated Rifleman have not been very good, but they’re correct on the merits of the issue. Kweli can get fucked.