Billboard, Jan. 5: After playing Frogger around the release-date calendar for months, Mos Def’s third disc is damned to that post-Christmas week where releases go to die. And true to the timing, it’s one of the season’s most disappointing frustrations.
The bright spot is a burner: “Dollar Day (Surprise Surprise)” is a scorching indictment of the nonresponse to Hurricane Katrina that finds Mos literally screaming about the horrors and prejudices uncovered by the storm, all stamped on the bang-beat from Juvenile’s “Nolia Clap.”
The bad news: That track has been on the Internet for well over a year now, and Mos has been decidedly less bothered by things since. Like its predecessor, the equally undercooked “The New Danger,” there is a sense that a deadline crawled up before the music was cemented. “Magic” is less rapped than murmur-sung, less fiery than droning and repetitive. There is a piercing want of innovation in the clumsily titled “Thug Is a Drug,” an essay on gangsterism done a hundred times more eloquently on the Black Star record, and two-minute tracks like “A Ha” and “Napoleon Dynamite” sound super-dated.
With admirable force, Mos wants to push around the edges of hip-hop, and he comes close on the slinky, sinister “Murder of a Teenage Life” and the Iraq-themed “Fake Bonanza.” But with two clunker albums in a row, one wonders where his center is now.
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