Blackstar

Product Information

Kweli and Bey, born Dante Smith, got to know each other in the early ’90s, freestyling in Manhattan’s Washington Square Park and appearing at the same local spoken-word events. Kweli, the son of college professors, approached hip-hop as an NYU theater student. Bey, a former child actor, was juggling dueling aspirations for careers in rapping and acting; he started a group called Urban Thermo Dynamics with his brother and sister, starred on the short-lived genre experiment The Cosby Mysteries, and logged respectable guest features on records by groups like De La Soul. The two Brooklyn rappers became fast friends. By 1997, they’d started making music together. Working alongside the producer DJ Hi-Tek and Rawkus Records, an upstart indie imprint founded by friends at Brown University, Bey and Kweli crafted exciting cuts like “Fortified Live,” “Universal Magnetic,” and “2000 Seasons” — all soon to be highlights from Soundbombing I, the landmark 1997 compilation collecting early works from Bey, Kweli, and Company Flow, and great performances from legendary oddballs like Kool Keith, Sir Menelik, and R.A. the Rugged Man. Then the duo went a step further, and in 1998 dropped an album. Now, as reported by SPIN, it’s been revealed that the LP casts a reflection revealing an image when angled onto walls or ceilings. “Reflecting light off one side of the vinyl at certain angle creates what looks like a star,” SPIN reader Robert Matthews told the magazine, with another claimed that “when you reflect light off of side one you get a bird in flight. Side two, a space ship.” Photo: Robert Matthews Bowie knows all this. He will always have to answer to his epochal work of the 1970s, the decade in which he dictated several strands of popular and experimental culture, when he made reinvention seem as easy as waking up in the morning. Rather than trying to outrun those years, as he did in the '80s and '90s, he is now mining them in a resolutely bizarre way that scoffs at greatest-hits tours, nostalgia, and brainless regurgitation.