Is it possible for a Renaissance Man to overstretch himself? That’s the question posed by Mos Def’s second solo album, the long-awaited “New Danger”. Hip-hop, it seems, can’t contain such an ambitious polymath. Hence the five years since his “Black On Both Sides” have been filled with stage and movie acting (including a forthcoming role as Ford Prefect in "The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy"), and constant speculation about his next musical direction.
And so, the first section of “The New Danger” is not strictly a Mos Def solo work. Rather, it’s a showcase for Black Jack Johnson, a black rock supergroup featuring members of Parliament, Living Color, Tackhead and Bad Brains and fronted by Mos Def under his real name, Dante Smith. It’d be churlish to criticise his diversifying, generated as it is by a desire to reclaim rap-rock as a black music from oafs like Fred Durst – if only Mos Def were better at it. Even the presence of legendary guitarist Shuggie Otis, tempted out of retirement for the extended blues of “Blue Black Jack”, doesn’t conceal the fact that, for all Black Jack Johnson’s virtuosity, they’re troublingly short on tunes.
There’s jazz, of sorts, here too, with “Bedstuy Parade & Funeral March”, an indicator of his next career shift: as leader of a touring project, the Mos Def Big Band. But it’s only when the hip-hop returns that “The New Danger” really takes off. A prelude comes with track five, the unpleasantly-titled, homophobic “The Rapeover”, on which Kanye West recycles his music from Jay-Z’s “The Takeover” and Mos Def indicts the white multinational corporations he perceives as screwing black talent.
Then track eight, “Sex, Love & Money”, rolls around, and the album properly staggers into life. An ominous mix of martial beats and looming horns, it showcases at last the grouchily eloquent rapping with which Mos Def made his name. Black Jack Johnson still pop up occasionally, and a raft of Marvin Gaye samples (most notably on the epic “Modern Marvel”) help Mos Def pitch himself, with mixed results, as “The Boogie Man”, inheritor of Gaye’s conscious loverman mantle. The songs worth revisiting, though, are the relatively straightforward hip-hop tracks: Kanye’s canny reupholstering of the "Hair" soundtrack on “Sunshine”; the blaxploitation strut of “Life Is Real”; The Roots-ish “Champion Requiem”.
Criticising his eclecticism will, you suspect, confirm Mos Def’s suspicions: that the music business only tolerates black performers who work obediently within their genre. But the recent success and acclaim of Outkast, The Roots and N*E*R*D contradicts that. Mos Def is a fine rapper and actor. For now, though, he might be better off testing his artistic limits well away from the recording studio.
