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‘The music industry is as cold blooded as Scrooge McDuck’: the return of rapper Yasiin Bey
Under the radar for a decade, the artist formerly known as Mos Def is back. He talks about rejection, revival, and his new partnership with the Alchemist
It’s the penultimate night of Paris fashion week, and at Le Trianon, a storied 1,000-capacity music hall beneath Montmartre, Yasiin Bey – the artist formerly known as Mos Def – is holding court. But then we kinda ended up being that, low-key His debut single, the sublime Universal Magnetic, arrived in 1997 on James Murdoch’s Rawkus, the hottest imprint within New York’s then insurgent underground hip-hop scene. It came at the perfect moment – the nadir of the gangsta era, with the street verité of the genre’s early years now swapped for Puff Daddy’s soapy capitalist fantasies, and Bey’s socially conscious hip-hop was a welcome corrective.
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