Talib Kweli
Talib Kweli
Talib Kweli Greeneis an American hip hop recording artist, entrepreneur, and social activist. He is the son of professional educators. In 2011, Kweli founded Javotti Media, which is self-defined as "a platform for independent thinkers and doers". Kweli earned recognition early on through his work with fellow Brooklyn artist, Yasiin Bey, formerly known as Mos Def, when they formed the group Black Star. Kweli's career continued with solo success including collaborations with famed producers Kanye West, Just Blaze, and Pharrell...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionMusician
Date of Birth3 October 1975
CountryUnited States of America
Everybody could write, deejay, rap. Everybody could do it all.
By the time you get into other kinds of music - R&B, country, or whatever - it becomes something that's romantic. It becomes something unattainable. Never-ending undying love. And in hip hop, we're still taking direct inspiration.
As far as my New York influence, one thing I'm proud of in my career is, I rep Brooklyn, New York all day. But people don't look at my music as New York music. People consider my music underground music.
My fans like to be romantic. I feel like I'm creating at least at the same level or even a higher level of creativity than I was at twenty-one. I've gotten better as an artist.
I'm spinning records and I look across the restaurant and I see somebody who looks Asian. And I'm like, "Yo, that looks like Yoko Ono." I'm like, oh, I can just meet - that's going to be great. Then I look carefully and I'm like, "That's not Yoko Ono, that's Bruno Mars." And it was Bruno Mars. That just happened recently. I was bugging out. Because that was totally not Yoko Ono at all.
Hip hop is at its essence a folk music, because it speaks the language that people are still speaking at ground zero, it speaks the language that people speak on the streets.
With Prisoner of Conscience, the focus was - I've worked with Madlib, High Tech, Kanye West, J Dilla. I feel like I've worked with some of the greatest of all time. That's been overlooked. That's been overshadowed by the weight of the lyrics.
As an artist, I have to be a leader of my fans, not like follow them. Because if I chose to follow them, you know, they could do it.
I support the idea that artists have to make a stand. I'm with that - you're putting the discussion on the table and you're letting people know. You're being brave as an artist and responsible to the community.
Unfortunately hip-hop is so competitive that in order for fringe groups to get in, you gotta be better than whoever's the best. So before Eminem, the idea that there would be a white rapper that anybody would really check for was fantastic or amazing or impossible.
I was kind of just too lazy to take my money out of the bank until I saw how Citi Bank responded to Occupy Wall Street.
If you go to a college campus and you do stop and frisk, you're going to find a lot of drugs there too.