As his DJ on the tour, Preservation began to develop remixes of the album's songs, which he later released on the remix album The REcstatic in 2013. Initially regarded as one of the most promising rappers to emerge in the late 90s, Mos Def (aka Yasiin Bey), turned to acting in subsequent years as music. He embarked on an international tour to support the record, performing concerts in North America, Japan, Australia, and the United Kingdom between September and April 2010. A widespread critical success, The Ecstatic was viewed as a return to form for Mos Def and one of the year's best albums. Its sales benefited from its presence on Internet blogs and the release of a T-shirt illustrating the record's packaging alongside a label printed with a code redeemable for a free download of the album. The Ecstatic charted at number nine on the Billboard 200 in its first week of release and eventually sold 168,000 copies. Mos Def titled The Ecstatic after one of his favorite novels, the 2002 Victor LaValle book, believing its titular phrase evoked his singular creative vision for the album. Its loosely structured, lightly reverbed songs use unconventional time signatures and samples taken from a variety of international musical styles, including Afrobeat, soul, Eurodance, jazz, reggae, Latin, and Middle Eastern music. Mos Def's raps about global politics, love, spirituality, and social conditions are informed by the zeitgeist of the late 2000s, Black internalionalism, and Pan-Islamic ideas, incorporating a number of Islamic references throughout the album. The album has been described by music journalists as a conscious and alternative hip hop record with an eccentric, internationalist quality. For its front cover, a still from Charles Burnett's 1978 film Killer of Sheep was reproduced in red tint. Singer Georgia Anne Muldrow, formerly of the record label, was one of the album's few guest vocalists, along with rappers Slick Rick and Talib Kweli. Flash, Oh No, and Madlib, the latter two of whom reused instrumentals they had produced on Stones Throw Records. He worked with producers such as Preservation, Mr. It was released on June 9, 2009, by Downtown Records.Īfter venturing further away from hip hop with an acting career and two poorly received albums, Mos Def signed a recording contract with Downtown and recorded The Ecstatic primarily at the Record Plant in Los Angeles. 34 The phrase resonated with him, as he believed no one else in hip hop had ever recorded an album like The Ecstatic. Find highlights from the album after the break.The Ecstatic is the fourth album by American rapper Mos Def. According to Mos Def, the phrase 'the ecstatic' was 'used in the 17th and 18th centuries to describe people who were either mad or divinely inspired and consequently dismissed as kooks'. Sadly, after strong reviews and an obligatory loss to Eminem at the Grammys, The Ecstatic receded from the cultural memory bank. The contribution of all three guests–Slick Rick, Talib Kweli and, on the brilliantly inscrutable “Roses”, Georgia Anne Muldrow–is immense. Ten of the sixteen tracks fall under three minutes, and each one bleeds cohesively into the next: no filler interrupts. Like Madlib and MF DOOM with Madvillainy, Mos Def and his producers (one of whom, coincidentally, is Madlib) create with The Ecstatic a through-composed, radio-unfriendly treasure of underground hip hop. His lyrics solidify that impression: in each word, equal weight is placed on sound and meaning and the most evocative lines often are the most oblique. Permeating the mix are Mos Def’s raps, chants, scats, riffs, mumbles, yells and croons–a performance that is slam poetry as much as it is traditional hip hop. R&B, Spanish and Middle Eastern music, rock, '60s film soundtracks and other miscellanea form an ever-morphing soundscape. On The Ecstatic, production veers in wild and unusual directions, in defiance of pop clichés and pat verse-chorus templates. Mos Def has never been predictable enough for fame. Yet the newest of those releases, 2009’s The Ecstatic, is something rarer and better than a savior album: it is a mature work by a uniquely talented artist. the t-shirts will have the albums artwork on the front, its tracklist on the back. Roughly sixteen years later, Mos Def (now Yasiin Bey) is more actor and activist than musician, and his three LPs in the interim dynamited all hopes that he would “save” his genre. Mos Defs new album, The Ecstatic will be released as a t-shirt. His distinctive rapping style–loose, jazzy, partly sung–and his intelligent, expressive lyrics put him solidly at hip hop’s forefront. In the late ‘90s, two now-classic albums made Mos Def a star.
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