The 1990s File Feature
Definition
Black Star's "Definition": Underground Hip-Hop Meets the Mainstream Chart Mos Def (born Dante Terrell Smith on December 11, 1973, in Brooklyn, New York) and …
01 The Story
Black Star's "Definition": Underground Hip-Hop Meets the Mainstream Chart
Mos Def (born Dante Terrell Smith on December 11, 1973, in Brooklyn, New York) and Talib Kweli (born Talib Kweli Greene on October 3, 1975, in Brooklyn, New York) formed the hip-hop duo Black Star in the late 1990s as a deliberate artistic and ideological collaboration rooted in the Brooklyn hip-hop underground and in a shared commitment to lyric-forward, politically conscious rap that was explicitly positioned as an alternative to the commercial mainstream. Both artists had been active in New York's independent hip-hop community for several years before forming Black Star, and both brought extensive relationships with the underground rap scene, its producers, labels, and audiences, to their collaboration.
The Black Star album, also titled Mos Def & Talib Kweli Are Black Star, was released in August 1998 through Rawkus Records, a Brooklyn-based independent label that had emerged as one of the key institutional nodes of the late-1990s underground hip-hop movement. Rawkus had been founded in 1995 and quickly developed a reputation for releasing records that prioritized lyrical craft, social consciousness, and musical authenticity over commercial calculation. The label's roster and ethos made it an ideal home for Black Star's project, which shared Rawkus's aesthetic priorities while bringing an unusually high level of formal ambition and lyrical sophistication to the label's catalog.
"Definition" was the lead single from the Black Star album and debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on August 22, 1998, at number 94. The song climbed to its peak position of number 60 on September 26, 1998, spending 10 weeks on the chart in total. The song also appeared on the Billboard Hot Rap Singles chart, where it performed meaningfully for an independent release with limited mainstream promotional support. The fact that "Definition" reached number 60 on the Hot 100 from an independent label without significant radio rotation infrastructure was a notable commercial achievement that demonstrated the genuine audience for conscious hip-hop beyond the underground circuits where it primarily circulated.
The production on "Definition" was handled by 88-Keys, whose work on the track exemplified the sample-based, jazz-inflected production aesthetic that was central to the Rawkus sound and to the broader underground hip-hop movement of the era. The track's production drew on soul and jazz samples to create an warm, organic sonic environment that contrasted sharply with the harder, more synthetic production that characterized much of the commercial rap being released at the same time. This production choice aligned the song with the musical values of the Native Tongues collective and other artists who had been working to maintain jazz and soul connections within hip-hop throughout the late 1980s and 1990s.
The lyrical approach on "Definition" was characteristic of both Mos Def's and Talib Kweli's individual styles while demonstrating the productive tension that arose from their collaboration. Mos Def's verses were characterized by a flowing, conversational cadence and a facility with wordplay that made complex ideas feel accessible and immediate. Kweli's contribution was denser, more internally structured, and more explicitly political in its references and frameworks. The combination created a track that was both musically appealing and lyrically demanding in ways that appealed to listeners across the spectrum from casual to deeply engaged hip-hop audiences.
The release of the Black Star album in 1998 is now widely regarded as a watershed moment in independent hip-hop history, one of the records that demonstrated that commercially and critically successful rap could be made outside the major label system with a completely different set of aesthetic priorities than those that governed the mainstream. The album was critically acclaimed on release and has grown in reputation in the decades since, appearing on numerous critics' lists of the greatest hip-hop albums of all time. "Definition" as the lead single carried this aesthetic program in concentrated form and served as the most accessible entry point to the album's broader project for listeners discovering Black Star through radio or chart exposure.
Both Mos Def and Talib Kweli went on to substantial solo careers following the Black Star album, with Mos Def in particular achieving significant crossover success with his debut solo album Black on Both Sides in 1999 and a subsequent career that extended into acting and television. The success of "Definition" on the Hot 100 contributed to the visibility that supported these subsequent solo careers while also demonstrating the commercial viability of the conscious hip-hop approach that Rawkus Records had staked its institutional identity on. For a record made outside the major label system with minimal commercial radio support, a peak position of number 60 on the Hot 100 was a remarkable achievement.
02 Song Meaning
Identity, Naming, and Resistance in Black Star's "Definition"
The title "Definition" is not incidental or merely evocative; it is the organizing philosophical concept of the entire song. Mos Def and Talib Kweli are explicitly concerned with the act of naming, with who has the power to define terms, and with the political and cultural implications of claiming that power for oneself. The song operates within a long tradition of African American intellectual and artistic practice in which the right to self-definition is understood as a fundamental dimension of freedom and dignity, a tradition that runs from Frederick Douglass through the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement to the specific context of late-1990s conscious hip-hop.
The concept of self-definition carries particular weight in the context of Black Star's broader project. Both Mos Def and Talib Kweli were operating in a commercial environment in which African American artists were frequently subjected to externally imposed definitions: of what hip-hop should sound like, what subjects it should address, and what commercial forms it should take. The decision to name their song "Definition" was thus a statement about artistic and intellectual autonomy, a claim that they, rather than commercial forces or mainstream expectations, would determine the terms under which their work was understood and evaluated.
The lyrical content of the song is dense with references to specific historical, political, and cultural contexts that reward close attention. Both Mos Def and Talib Kweli were engaged, at the time of recording, with a tradition of African American intellectual thought that included figures from the civil rights movement, the Black Power movement, and the broader history of Black political and cultural activism. The song's references locate it within this tradition while also engaging with the specific conditions of Black life in late-1990s urban America, giving it both historical depth and contemporary specificity.
The formal choices in the song also carry meaning. The decision to build the track around a jazz and soul sample rather than the harder, more aggressive production that dominated commercial hip-hop at the time was not merely an aesthetic preference but a statement of cultural allegiance. By grounding their work in the Black musical traditions of jazz and soul, Mos Def and Kweli were locating "Definition" within a historical continuum of African American artistic achievement and claiming that continuum as the context within which their own work should be understood. This was the same move that artists associated with the Native Tongues collective had been making throughout the early 1990s, and Black Star's adoption of it connected them to that lineage.
The collaborative structure of the song, in which two voices with distinct styles and perspectives share the lyrical space, reinforces the song's thematic content. Definition, in the sense the song employs the term, is not a private or individual act; it is a communal practice, arrived at through dialogue and shared investment in common values and frameworks. The fact that Black Star was a duo rather than a solo act gave this philosophical point a material dimension: the song about definition is itself a product of collaboration, demonstrating through its form what it argues in its content about the collective nature of self-determination.
In retrospect, "Definition" can be seen as a statement about cultural survival in the face of commercial pressures. The late 1990s were a moment of intense tension within hip-hop between underground values and mainstream commercial demands, and Black Star's song was an explicit intervention in that tension, asserting the right of artists to maintain their own definitions of what hip-hop was and could be regardless of what the commercial mainstream required. That this argument achieved a peak position of number 60 on the Hot 100 suggested that the audience for this kind of principled artistic self-determination was larger than the commercial infrastructure might have predicted, a finding that would prove consequential for the subsequent development of independent and conscious hip-hop in the years that followed.
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