Collegiate Times

By Tom Minogue, staff writer

The fourth solo album from Mos Def, "The Ecstatic," gives listeners exactly what they expect out of such a title: Elaborate production and the slick rhymes of Def laid over some heavy beats.

The success of the album is in the effective way melody carries the voice of the rapper, and not the other way around.

Unlike contemporaries such as T-Pain or Kanye West, what Def (or at least his producer) understands is that the voice of the rapper doesn't need to be run through auto-tune if the necessary backing is provided.

The breadth of understanding this rapper has about production can be seen in the contrast between the lead single "Life in Marvelous Times" and second single "Quiet Dog."

The former is laden with a bevy of synthesizers with the bass pounding over a sampled orchestra piece.

It's a complex arrangement, but not one that overpowers the vocals he manages to lay down; the message of "We can't be alive in no time/But now" is accentuated by the balance between music and lyrics in the song.

Though the production is obviously intense, the voice of Def is not.

Instead of trying to strain his voice or force the tune through a vocoder, the simple words his voice manages to carry seem revelatory.

The man remembers that he's foremost a rap artist and not a choir-boy, after all, something that would have been useful to the above-mentioned artists.

It's hard to believe rap that's so much more honest musically isn't nearly as pervasive as the songs about getting drunk.

Def is much closer to his predecessors, Biggie Smalls and A Tribe Called Quest, than the vast majority of his peers.

Maybe this has something to do with technological direction of the times, though.

For all the apparent auditory sensation of "Life in Marvelous Times," there's the comparative simplicity of "Quiet Dog."

Opening with a spoken word passage, the track is an ardent combination of bass drum, claps and verse.

Almost the polar opposite of the first single, the dichotomy between the two tracks proves the versatility on the rest of the album.

The lack of club-bangers on the record is more than made up for by the heat with which Mos Def brings his flow.

"Pretty Dancer," taken from a phrase Muhammad Ali used after knocking an opponent out, finds him juggling social critique with words that hit like punches.

Verses like "Get smart with your smartness/Too busy survivin' to argue about Darwin" floats like a lyrical butterfly but stings like a literal bee.

For fans of true hiphop, you can take this as a sign that your favorite art form is alive and kicking it.

For everyone else, this album is an easy-to-absorb, excellent-to-listen-to venture of the orchestrated word.

Mos Def deserves congratulations for keeping the soul in hiphop.

Grade:

A

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