Talib Kweli: Can't Tell Me Nothing
By: John Kennedy
POSTED: 16:16 EST, August 17, 2007

Believe it or not, Talib Kweli cares what you think of him. His eyes - barely visible behind his gold-framed, brown-tinted Aviator lenses - gaze inquisitively at the notepad every time the observant young reporter before him touches pen to paper. Even while seated in a fifth-floor office at VIBE's Manhattan headquarters, the Brooklyn-born lyricist voices his discontent with the magazine's review of his latest project, Eardrum. "They didn't give the album enough credit," says the 31-year-old Kweli, who read the review in our August 2007 issue moments earlier. "My album was way better than [the critic] said it was. She's going to eat her words."

Don't think Talib's totally turned Kanye on us. ("Maybe I'm not being fair," he adds later with a laugh.) As the white letters screen-printed across his pink tee would tell it, Kweli's more "New York Dope Boy" than self-absorbed backpacker. But to most, he is one of hip-hop's brightest minds and illest rhymers. The nine-year veteran, born Talib Kweli Greene, was celebrated from the onset of his career, as backpackers in Brooklyn and beyond bumped his collaborative albums with Mos Def (1998's Black Star) and Hi-Tek (2000's Train of Thought). Conversely, the Rawkus alum's follow-ups, 2002's Quality and 2004's The Beautiful Struggle, didn't satisfy some fans and press, who thought the projects sacrificed cohesion for commercial viability. Suddenly, like a kitchen crowded with cooks, everyone thought they knew the single ingredient to make Kweli's recipe perfect.

"You want everybody to like you," he says, his olive green cap leaning to the right. "All artists have that in them. But as you grow, you realize you can't do that, because then you're a politician and you're not a real artist. You've got to make a stand." He does just that on Eardrum, out August 21, dedicating several bars of "Stay Around" to the naysayers: "Kweli, you should rap about this, you should rap about that / Any more suggestions? You, in the back," he mocks.

Jests aside, Kweli hopes his attention to beats will fend off the backseat drivers this time around. He enlisted the likes of knob-turners will.i.am and Pete Rock to help bridge stage-friendly sounds with neck-jerking, boom-bap vibes. "When I first started my career, it was about stuff that sounds good in your headphones that you nod to," says Kweli, his head bobbing to an imaginary bassline. "Now I'm [playing over 200 shows yearly], and I have to rock the motherfuckin' house... So my experience changed. It's now my job to make sure that whole building moves. My beat selection changes with that."

Kweli's also changed his role in the industry, upgrading his corporate game since his last non-indie project. Eardrum will be the first major release from his young Blacksmith Music Corp., which he launched with the help of manager Corey Smyth. Maintaining the name of Smyth's 16-year-old management company, Blacksmith Music's creation was spurred as much by label politics as it was Kweli's take-charge business mindset. "Anytime within the last three years when you seen a mixtape, a video or an ad," he explains, "it was because of my own money and things that I've done. I was doing it independently for a long time so it was time to make that official." He first considered trading the backpack for a briefcase after his former home, MCA, was dissolved into Geffen back in 2003. The label eventually swept him under the rug, prompting the wordsmith to bounce from the Interscope-parented company and ink a distribution deal for his Blacksmith Music with Warner Bros. just days into 2006. "It's something for people to be a part of as opposed to me just being some rapper with 16 bars," Kweli says of Blacksmith. "I can now empower myself and empower other artists."

Wielding his signing powers quickly, Kweli brought on lyrical lioness Jean Grae and West Coast collective Strong Arm Steady. "They're ambitious enough to have their own followings and their own career paths. They've built their own legends and myths, with or without me," he observes of his lottery picks. "Those are the type of artists that I want to be aligned with." Not to mention current Hall of Famers like the legendary Rakim, who sits prominently atop Kweli's wish list.

If only running a full-fledged label were always as easy as simply picking and choosing dope acts. "To get people to respect you as an executive, when you've formed a relationship based on you being an artist - it's challenging." But a more familiar hurdle hasn't escaped Kweli in his ascension to CEO: the age-old nuisance of album leaks. More than seven months before The Beautiful Struggle's release, he batted out a scathing post directed at an Internet user who shared an unfinished copy of the album on the online hip hop community, Okayplayer.com. And although Eardrum hit the Web in early June, Kweli is a lot more composed these days. "Those people can be destructive to your career, but at the same time, they're tastemakers," he says of the downloading crowd. "There's a whole audience that doesn't go on the Internet to check for music. They're going to have felt the buzz from the Internet to know, 'Okay, this is good. I might want to check this out.'"

Yup, Kweli's clearly embraced of the world of blogs and MySpace. Just peep the much-lauded Liberation, his joint project with producer Madlib. The rapper threw his fans a bone and released the nine-song EP to the net free of charge on New Years Day 2007. He's also keeping his digital audience in tune via "The Story of Blacksmith," a "text novella" or short story readable only on mobile devices. Although only an exclusive 5,000 fans will receive the 15 text message chapters that constitute the story, others will spare their thumbs and instead point and click to "Words of Eardrum," Kweli's blogged backstory on the songs of his forthcoming long-player, featured here on VIBE.com (read the first installment below). As you can see, the man gets computers 'puting, for real. "It's not like you hear my songs on the radio like that," he says, "so I need to exploit all of the avenues."

It's this reality of limited airplay that keeps Kweli regularly rocking arenas. And even there he's drawn grumbling from the peanut gallery. But being second only to the Roots in yearly concert appearances among hip-hoppers, Kweli takes the remarks seriously. "At a certain point in my career it became like a job. It became just like, remote control," he says of performing. "I started reading reviews that felt like that, so it made me want to step my show up. When I started to do that, I started to see the change in the show reviews, so certainly that helped."

Sure, a couple concert reviews every now and then may help him stay sharp on stage. But Kweli remains unfazed by the rest of the quibble. "You have to be able to differentiate between criticism, bad or good, and straight-out hating, someone just don't like you," he says. "I use it as fuel... it's fuel to the fire."

Flame on, Talib.

Talib Kweli's "Words of Eardrum": Chapter 1
Excellence. I think the name of my next album will be Prisoner of Conscious, because sometimes the burden of making conscious art is too heavy too bear. I go thru a range of feelings and emotions, and not all of them are uplifting or right and exact. The key is being honest with yourself as you grow, and God willing your audience will take that journey with you. It is not enough to be conscious, you have to be excellent at your craft. Nobody buys a Kweli record because I'm conscious, and if they say they do, they lying. They buy it because it sounds good. Maybe because it sounds good AND it's perceived as conscious music, but not just because. However, I can't forget that I'm a musician, not a politician. Politicians have to make everyone like them, and that's why you can't trust them. As an artist, the only way for be to be everything to all people is to focus on my strengths, and learn from my weakness. I can't use another man's formula to sell my product.