Mos Def: in all the noise about race in America, here's a voice that cuts through��singing, rapping, acting

JEFFREY WRIGHT: Let's start with the important question of the day: Who are you screwing?

MOS DEF: No comment. [both laugh] C'mon--let's talk about the play, man.

JW: Well, hold on. You're doing the play, Topdog/Underdog, [for which playwright Suzan Lori-Parks won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Drama] on Broadway, you've got a highly acclaimed album, Black on Both Sides [Rawkus, 1999], that's been out for a few years, you have a highly anticipated hip-hop/rock 'n' roll album with your new band, Black Jack Johnson, coming out later this year, you were in an Oscar-nominated movie [Monster's Ball) and you're hosting [Russell Simmons Presents) Def Poetry, a groundbreaking TV show, all simultaneously, which begs the question--

MD:--when do I sleep?

JW: When do you sleep and what are you?

MD: [both laugh] Focused. I'm a hustler. And my hustle is trying to figure out the best ways to do what I like without having to do much else.

JW: Well, aside from you, what's the common denominator between all these projects?

MD: They all have a voice. You know, I've done some standard Hollywood fare, like Showtime, the film I did with Robert De Niro, and a romantic comedy with Sanaa Lathan and Taye Diggs [due out this fall] called Brown Sugar-

JW:--I forgot to mention those.

MD: I plug myself. [Wright laughs] And the thing all these projects have in common is that even if I wasn't a part of them, I'd be a fan of them.

JW: You seem to be very well placed among a group of emerging voices. Do you consider yourself part of an artistic movement?

MD: I'm serious about everything I'm doing, but I don't get into this whole messianic thing where it's like, "We're coming to revolutionize the world." I'm just trying to be true to who I am. And I work with artists who think that way, too. I feel kinship with Outkast, with [Talib] Kweli, Black Thought, Jay-Z, Fishbone, Living Color, anybody that's being honest. It sounds corny, but it's true.

JW: Is that honesty innate in American popular culture or is it some kind of counterculture?

MD: I think it's a counterculture. And that's good, because it's challenging popular culture. It's like the difference between Hollywood and Sundance: Hollywood comes to Sundance looking for a certain quality of work that has traditionally existed outside of the Hollywood system. So the counterculture--Sundance--is challenging the popular culture-Hollywood--in a way that makes the popular culture better. It's not about eliminating the popular culture, because there are a lot of good things in it.

JW: So the implication isn't that popular culture is more founded in lies?

MD: I think it's founded on the bottom line--money. I understand where Hollywood and a lot of popular culture comes from--they spend a bunch of money, and they've got to make it back. My problem with it is that there's no dynamism. I think popular culture needs to make space for divergent views and ideas, allow them to get some airtime.

JW: Does that imply that these divergent views aren't about making money?

MD: It's always about making money--this is show business--and there's nothing wrong with that. But what will you do for money? Are you going to take a job you hate because it pays well, or are you going to find a job where you do what you love and make money that way? People should be able to pay their bills from their art.

JW: Hip-hop is, in many people's eyes, a counterculture--counter to traditional American values--and so much of the hiphop that gets airtime speaks to the themes of money and the power and necessity of extravagance. It seems to me it's a particularly American art form in that way, and for that reason I think it's not so revolutionary--or at least it's not running counter to what it is alleged to be running counter to.

MD: That's a good point. What happens in hiphop happens in the rest of popular culture, but on a much more clandestine level. For the most part, a rock artist is not going to sing about money and materialism, but the suggestion is there in their videos, photo shoots and public presentation. The hip-hop artist is honest enough, or in some cases oblivious enough, to talk about his aspirations. "I want money," "I want out the ghetto," "I want this," "I want that." Hip-hop exposes that gold-rush fever that's in all of the music business--a rock band, jazz band or whatever band, they're all thinking the same thing: I want to get paid. I want to be a star. With hip-hop, there's no cover on it, and in that sense I think it's revolutionary because it raises the issue of materialism in America--not just in hip-hop--and it's being said in raw, straight talk by young, poor people.

JW: Young, poor, black people. So the revolutionary idea is that young, poor, black people are talking about extravagance?

MD: That's it. That's the real deal.

JW: You know, I have a personal peeve with what's been happening with hip-hop and the diamond fetish within the community. I went to Sierra Leone a few months ago when I finished shooting Ali--we shot the "Rumble in the Jungle" scenes in Mozambique, and I traveled around a bit afterwards. I had been following the war there, which was rooted in the diamond trade. I saw many things, but most striking was an 11-month-old girl who'd had her arm chopped off. The rebels were attempting to alter free elections. They went out, many of them young boys, and just brutalized people, most of whom will never see a diamond in their lives. Now, I understand why white American culture would fetishize a diamond, because historically it's never shown concern about the lives of African people, or the ramifications of its wealth, but I wonder: In young black American culture right now, do folks not perceive a connection to Africa that may color their perception of the value of the diamond, do they just not care, or are they ignor ant?

MD: I think that some don't care and most just don't even know. There are black people suffering across the African continent and there are black people here in America that play a part in their suffering. I don't think there's been enough public awareness created about what's happening in Africa. The diamond wars, the AIDS epidemic, the changes in government, ecological abuses. . . . What happens in Africa is not news that gets to African-Americans, so there's never any relationship that African-Americans can have to Africa, and the Africans who come here--and the Caribbeans and black people who come from other places--come with the idea that they are on a higher level than black Americans. They come with the idea that they're more evolved, more educated.

JW: But at the same time, having traveled to a few African countries, I've found that many young Africans idolize what's happening in young black American culture, as do young Japanese, young Swedes, young Czechs, young Brits and so on, and that's what I find promising and at the same time--

MD: --hurtful.

JW: Yeah, because there is such an enormous potential for connection--

MD: --that we're not realizing. Here's the deal: I'd love to see all the hard-core rhyme beats go to Africa to do a show . . . Go to J'burg [Johannesburg], Zimbabwe, Mozambique. Tupac [Shakur] never went to Africa. Jay-Z's never gone to Africa. With a lot of artists, the reason they don't go probably has less to do with them, and more to do with who they're informed by. Who was going to tell [Tu]'Pac to go to Africa, Suge [Knight]? A lot of rap artists are suffering from bad company.

JW: It's the Mike Tyson syndrome.

MD: Exactly. Perfect. With a lot of these young artists, their managers are just concerned about them as commercial commodities, not as human beings. I think if 'Pac had had different people around him, he would be alive today.

JW: Speaking of Mike Tyson, black heavyweight champions have reflected the eras in which they fought: Joe Louis and the period of integration; Ali and the time of black self-empowerment; Tyson and an era in which great potential gives way to self-sabotage. So, why did you choose "Black Jack Johnson" as the name of your new music project?

MD: I named it Black Jack Johnson because hip-hop is America's champ, the champ that nobody wants. Jack Johnson had all the skills-- he was handsome, he was charismatic and he was a fantastic fighter, and he still got no love, and I think it's the same with hip-hop. Folks sell millions of records, influence the rest of popular culture, and still continue to be misrepresented.

JW: What's the Black Jack Johnson sound?

MD: It's a fusion of hip-hop and rock 'n' roll, and hip-hop as rock 'n' roll. I like to stay flexible; it means you can adapt to all types of situations. If you're stiff, you face certain situations you can't bend around, so they bend around you, and I don't want be in that type of position.

JW: You live in Brooklyn, across the river from the World Trade Center. What's happened outside your window since 9-1-1? As an artist, do you have any special obligations at this time?

MD: Do you remember as a kid, when some part of the house was dirty that you weren't responsible for but your mother still said, "Clean it up"? Well, obviously I had nothing to do with what went on at the World Trade Center, but people are really affected by it and if I see somebody in trouble, as an artist, as a human being, if there is something I can do that can be helpful or useful, I'm going to do it. It's a responsibility of life to respond to your surroundings and your world.

JW: The show we're doing together, Topdog/Underdog. was supposed to hit Broadway in November, but we got pushed back after the 11th. You saw the first run of the show, downtown at the Public Theater, a number of times.

MD: Five. [both laugh]

JW: Why'd you see it so often, and what do you think its relevance is now, post-9/11?

MD: I saw it so often because, honestly, I missed the beginning a couple of times [Wright laughs] and it's something you can't see just once, anyway. This play, before and after 9/11, is about so many things. It serves as a metaphor for America and how it has yet to recognize the duality that exists. You've got Lincoln and Booth--

JW: --The play's two characters, you and me.

MD: Yes, our characters. You've got them in one room, which is America. You've got two sides of that room, which could be north and south, Democrat and Republican, popular culture or counterculture. And the interesting thing post-9/11 is that people are starting to understand that we're not all just in America together, we're in the world together. The characters don't really have a relationship to the rest of the world and, as a result, it messes with them--their development, their perception of themselves, of race, family, history. It's a metaphor for what happens when people become so isolated.

JW: It's a play about the disenfranchised. The characters are two young black men.

MD: Yeah? I thought they were Irish.

JW: [laughs] Maybe some nights we'll try that. They feel a simmering frustration, and that rage has to be placed somewhere. The connection that I drew was that there was a similar simmer around the world relative to America. And the more these voices can be heard, the more we as a society, as a world, can understand what violence is born out of, the more we can understand.

MD: And we can prevent it from happening again.

JW: (emphasizing each word] We can prevent it from happening again. So, we're doing the same play, I guess. [both laugh] Do you think fans of your music and fans of hip-hop--the spoken word tradition--will find something in this play?

MD: They'd better! [laughs] Especially with this play because it speaks of an experience that hasn't, at least in my experience with the theater, been spoken of in a long time.

JW: It's the first Broadway play since Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf that was written by--

MD: --a black woman, Suzan Lori-Parks. There's something valuable about the stories she tells, the language she tells them in and the characters who inhabit them. They're mostly people who are marginalized, and I have a great interest in those people.

JW: You grew up in a marginalized environment yourself. There's not a well-beaten path from the Brooklyn projects to the Great White Way--how did you find the way?

MD: I was like that dude in [The] Shawshank [Redemption, 19941--he wasn't going to stay in jail, and I didn't like jail. I didn't like the projects; I didn't like being institutionalized. I had an idea there was some other shit going on outside, and I wanted to know what it was.

Life is 10 percent condition and 90 percent response--that's something my father used to say--it's not the situation, it's how you respond to it. And my response to the ghetto, and the projects in particular, was to get out. You know, life has nothing to do with being a product of our environments--we're products of the environments of ourselves, of our minds and our ambitions. I'm just a guy who's doing what he always wanted to do, and I'm busting my ass. I work hard. That's the bottom line. Why does Michael Jordan have six rings? Because he's gutting it out. Why does George Lucas live the way he does? Because he guts it out, he works. Jay-Z works. Puffy works. The key to my success is that I work. You'd have a rough time living in my house and being useless.

Jeffrey Wright was most recently seen in Ali.

JEFFREY WRIGHT When it came to choosing an interviewer for the multitalented Mos Def, we turned to actor and writer Jeffrey Wright, who shares the stage with Mos in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway play Topdog/Underdog. "He has what s a sometimes scary facility with the improvised word," Wright says of his co-star. Wright is currently filming HBO's production of Angels in America, but says his most exciting new project is his eight-month-old son.

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