Mos Def - Photo By Ros O'Gorman
Mos Def has changed his name to Yasiin Bey and released a ‘reinterpretation’ of the Watch The Throne track ‘Niggas In Paris’.
In September last year, Mos Def announced that he would retire his moniker and release music under the name of Yasiin Bey.
He said to MTV: “Mos Def is a name that I built and cultivated over the years, it’s a name that the streets taught me, a figure of speech that was given to me by the culture and by my environment, and I feel I’ve done quite a bit with that name and it’s time to expand and move on. Also, I didn’t want to have to deal with having any moniker or separation between the self that I see and know myself as.”
Now his first new music has emerged online (still listed by sites as belonging to Mos Def). It’s a pretty snarky re-imagining of Jay-Z and Kanye West’s sinister Watch The Throne track ‘Niggas In Paris’. Re-titled ‘Niggas In Poorest’, he raps about abject poverty using the beats that previously accompanied Jay and Ye’s boasts of fashion, fame and limitless cash.
It’s the first of what will reportedly be a series of re-workings of popular songs called Top 40 Underdog.
Check it out below.
