Shout out to Mark Ronson as well, who opened up his studio to let us do some big room mixes of the material on there. It happened fairly quickly-everything was recorded in two weeks. Everything sounded so familiar, yet singular, and I was really excited about it. A lot of those rhymes I had written in 2011-2012 when I was living in New Orleans. Also, shout out to ACyde, who was a part of that time as well. To be candid, I was responding to the frequencies that were there. I made a stop in London and I said, “I should do some things here.” And A$AP was around, and people were coming and going, so it was an active time, it was a good time.Įach of your albums sounds almost completely different. I think I was settling between London and Paris, and I was in the work cycle, doing dates here and there. I spend a lot of time working in Paris and Europe, so whenever I’m there I have a place where I stay pretty regularly, on a part-time basis. I was already in London I think I was doing a show or something like that. I met Tusk first, then Steven Julien, then Dean Blunt, and the other artists working in that area and NTS Radio crew. She was a fan of theirs and recommended that we meet in East London. Yasiin Bey: I was introduced to Lord Tusk by a partner of mine that I was working with at the time, Samira Hamid Sharifu. VIBE: You recorded this in London in 2015. I’m an explorer, you know? Let’s have an adventure, and see what we can discover. He detailed his embrace of visual art as a medium of expression, how he’s not at war with streaming services, and why so many of his recent works have taken so long to come out. Yasiin spoke to VIBE for fifteen minutes in the museum’s outdoor courtyard before his second performance and surprisingly resumed the conversation for another half hour in front of the building afterward. 21), Yasiin Bey and Lord Tusk gave two live performances in the museum’s auditorium that featured stirring visual imagery and the reveal of several songs that didn’t appear in the exhibit itself. In the week of Negus‘ opening, Brooklyn Museum hosted dance parties for the exhibit that included Dave Chappelle and Q-Tip as attendees. On another song, he gives a shout out to Bobby Shmurda and uses the phrase “polar cap Kool-Aid” to speak about the dangers of climate change, in what sounds like a sparse follow-up to his brilliant 2000 song “New World Water.” It’s easy to miss a bar or two since you can’t rewind or pause, but Negus feels more rooted in vibe than it is in lyrical sustenance it’s more about the total experience than it is about minute details. Topically, the album conveys people’s responses to difficult times: on one song he says “it’s easy to catch a fever in a cold world,” and three songs later, he sounds more determined to actually persevere through it. The best song appears to be called “Waves,” and it’s one of a couple that uses soul samples that feel more familiar. But off of two visits to the exhibit and a live performance of the album at the museum, much of the album is sonically reminiscent of Dec. With it being the first piece of Yasiin Bey music in two years, it’s frustrating to have limited access to it. Bey has taken on different production styles with nearly every album since his seminal Black On Both Sides from 20 years ago. It’s difficult to comprehensively review the music of Negus: Yasiin Bey usually creates music that demands multiple listens, not only to discover the lyrical nooks and crannies but to get accustomed to the sound. ![]() Ebtekar, Mehretu, and Parla all created their pieces specifically for the installation after Bey played the album for them. Another piece is a collaboration between Bey and Jose Parla, which Bey described to Zelaya as “the beginning of a story that was never told.” And on the other wall, are two pieces by Julie Mehretu. On the opposite wall is a starry, celestial piece by Ala Ebetekar. According to a press release for the exhibit, negus (pronounced neh-goose) means “king” or “ruler” in Ge’ez, “an ancient Semitic language of Ethiopia.” (Kendrick Lamar used the term on “i” from To Pimp A Butterfly.) Yasiin uses the word to refer to noble figures, and the presumed centerpiece of the exhibition is a giant textile mural that has an embedded photo of the late Nipsey Hussle and visual renderings of the cells of Henrietta Lacks, a black cancer patient whose unique cells were taken without her consent and used as the basis for billions of dollars of medical research and biotechnology. ![]() He then presented the album as an art installation at art fairs in Morocco, Dubai, and Hong Kong the Brooklyn Museum exhibit is the first time it’s available for public consumption, and it has a tracklist and visual element unique to Brooklyn. Yasiin Bey originally recorded Negus in London in 2015 with producers Lord Tusk, Steven Julien, and ACyde, with raps he had written a few years prior.
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