The Beautiful Hustle

It’s a rare day off for Talib Kweli, and technically, it’s not really a day off. He may not be performing, but he’s on the road, in Denver, talking to me — and later on, a handful of other writers — about himself and his music. This Brooklyn, New York native, a thoughtful and well-spoken MC, is an artist who exists on the cusp between underground stardom and major label success, and he works very hard to keep himself and his music in the foreground of the hip-hop landscape, including granting interviews to pretty much whoever wants to speak with him, whenever he can be available.
Currently between a stint on the Warped Tour and a main stage slot on the Sprite Liquid Mix Tour, Talib isn’t really taking this time to slow down. When he’s not hyping crowds and making new fans at touring extravaganzas like Warped and Sprite, Talib is in the habit of spending his evenings at one-off performances or on his own tours, performing in clubs. Headlining smaller club gigs gives him more time on stage, gets him closer to his true fans, and these days, is helping him work through a few musical issues.
“For the last three years I’ve been touring with a DJ and two background singers, but I just had to get two new background singers. We’re doing as many one-offs as we can right now so they can get this stuff down as quickly as possible,” explains Talib, who’s quick to put a positive spin on the situation. “But I enjoy doing one-offs. It’s definitely more money for me, so that makes it much easier to tour because it’s tough to make money on tour unless you got tour support from the label. So the one-offs help out, but they’re also more fun. On the big tours I’m doing now, I do a little 20 or 30 minute set, so it’s nice to be able to really rock out sometimes.”
Not that being on the Warped Tour is something he’s unhappy about. In fact, that subject gets him going a bit, and he quickly starts talking about what he got out of his time on the punk tour, what he learned from it and who he met.
“It was great. I learned a lot, I met some of my heroes, like Jello Biafra, and I kicked it with Ice T, who I knew already, but I got to see him with Body Count and that was really dope. Seeing Ice T with Body Count when I was in high school was one of moments that I can remember that inspired me to do this, you know?” asks Talib, rhetorically, who says that there were definitely more new experiences on Warped than familiar ones. “The majority of the bands, I’d say 90 percent of them, I had never heard of before, so I learned a lot. I got to rock with this band called Less Than Jake. They let me come on their set every day, and now I’m about to do a remix with them. So it was a good experience all around, and it only lasted a couple of weeks.”
In that time, says Talib, he was exposed to a vastly different audience than he’s used to. Largely populated by suburban punk rock kids whose knowledge of rap rarely goes beyond Top 40 or the recognized classics, the Warped Tour audiences responded well to Talib’s sets.
“There were kids who were into punk music, but they were really just into musicianship and into music. The majority of the kids watchin’ me didn’t know me; some of them knew me, but they were just interested in seeing what this was about,” recalls Talib, who expects the upcoming Sprite Tour to offer a different kind of audience. “It’s gonna be interesting because, with the Neptunes and The Roots, it’s definitely more of a hip-hop lineup [than the Warped Tour]. Last year’s Sprite Tour, with Jay — because he’s such a larger than life artist — seemed like the Jay-Z tour. For someone else, though, it may have seemed like a 311 tour. I don’t how they pulled it off, but every show would be packed with people watching 311, then you’d see a huge crowd leave, then it would be packed with different people watching Jay-Z. I don’t know if it’s gonna be quite the same with OAR and the Neptunes this year. I don’t know what’s gonna happen. Should be interesting.”
It’s that pliable attitude that has helped Talib navigate a career that has had its share of ups and downs. He first started gaining national exposure after he was signed to the small New York indie, Rawkus Records, which, in the mid- to late 1990s, released several albums — including Talib’s Reflection Eternal with DJ High Tek and the Black Star album, which featured Talib with fellow Brooklyn-born rapper Mos Def — that changed the look, sound and feel of the indie rap game. But as the year 2000 approached, Rawkus became caught up in the major label game and some of the pitfalls that are associated with it. After being absorbed by a major label and temporarily being lost in the shuffle, many of Rawkus’ core artists found themselves without contracts or even contacts at the label. Talib says that he had no choice but to set out on his own, and he offers what he calls the “Readers’ Digest” version of what went down.
“First off, I have a great relationship with Rawkus. They supported me all throughout my career, but they did one thing that was just crazy — they lost their distribution deal and they didn’t prepare for it, much less prepare their artists for it. I ended up in a situation where I couldn’t get in touch with anybody from Rawkus and I didn’t know what was going on,” explains Talib, who wasn’t about to let the situation sink everything he had worked for. “I just started trying to put myself out there, doing mixtapes, doing shows and touring — whatever it took. I hooked up with MCA after a while, some money started flowin’, I got my new record, Quality, off the ground a little bit and I put out the first single, ‘Waitin’ On The DJ,’ but MCA wasn’t really feeling me at all. The MCA president at the time, Jay Boberg, was really an asshole and he just didn’t have a clue. People used to wonder why MCA had such a talented stable but could never really get a record off the ground — it was because of him. But he got fired, a new staff took over and more interest developed in my project. We put out the next single, ‘Get By,’ but now MCA has just folded and a lot of it has transferred to Geffen, so now there’s some new people and some old people and I’m just trying to figure out what my situation is with Geffen. In the meantime, I’m working on a new album.”
Talib may be working on a new album, but there’s still plenty of life left in Quality. The record’s second single, “Get By,” is enjoying a fair level of attention on MTV2 and Fuse TV, as well as urban and college radio, and it is the music that he’s currently touring on. His previous full-length, Reflection Eternal with DJ High Tek, was an underground hit, and Talib set out to top it with Quality.
“I was very proud of the Reflection Eternal album, you know? God blessed us with that,” Talib is careful to say, then continues, “but I wanted to try to top that, try to make an album that had more textures than the last one. With the Reflection Eternal album, as great as it was, the texture stayed the same throughout ‘cause it was just me and High Tek. So I wanted to do an album that had more layers and more textures and I wanted to do an album that was a little more simple, a little more straight forward and straight ahead. Instead of an album of ideas that I had to get out of my head, I made one full of things that the music that I chose inspired me to say — instead of me finding music for my lyrics, I found my lyrics for the music.”
That’s not necessarily the way most MCs work when they’re writing, but Talib is not most MCs. Listening to his music will reveal the mind of a man who does not bling, bang or ball. He’s no wimp on the mic, but Talib doesn’t pretend to be a gangsta or a pimp either, and maybe that’s why his popularity is growing so quickly. Average folks can’t always relate to criminal hip-hop, and Talib’s rap is plainly connected to real life.
“It’s who I am. It’s hard for me to bullshit because I’m not good at it. There is some bullshit you will hear in my music — like, I talk a lot about smackin’ people, and I would do it if someone really pissed me off, but I don’t just walk around smackin’ people. If you listen to music and take everything seriously though, you might think I walk around smackin’ wack MCs all day, but I’m not really doin’ it. Generally, I just try to speak from my experience. I can’t do anything else,” he flatly states after joking around for a second. For Talib, being in touch with reality is as important as being in touch with himself. This personally empowered rhyme-smith knows what he has and what he wants, and understands what it takes to get it.
“God has blessed me,” Talib casually beams. “I’ve been able to be successful, I’ve been able to do what I want to do for a living. It’s definitely a struggle and it’s definitely a hustle, but it’s a beautiful struggle and a beautiful hustle.”

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