Mos Def – Black On Both Sides

i had never listened to this album front to back before but i was familiar with the hits, and holy shit did this blow me away. great bass, great vocals, no surface noise. such a dope first listening experience!

Now having both the OG press and this 2015 pressing, this repress sounds great, and nice and thick heavyweight vinyl. I did notice that there’s a slight difference between two “Ms. Fat Booty”s. The 2015 one cuts out after Mos says “What?!”, whereas the OG version keeps going with the Aretha sample and Mos ad libbing.

I have this and side B has so much surface noise it's about unlistenable. Shame, cos the album itself is excellent.

My copy sounds super clean. No issues whatsoever. So is the only way to distinguish this 2021 pressing from the others, is the bar code on the seam?

Amazing press, no pops or scratches, and dead flat which is quite unique these days for a new record..

At the Intersection of Hip Hop and Masterpiece

While the golden age of hip hop had come to a definite close, one final album had to make it through the portal and into music history for artists of multiple genres to marvel at and hold the radio close.

After Mos Def stepped out of the shadows and into the sunlight with Black Star, his solo efforts were already blooming into the works to define the world of hip hop through his own eyes, and his first solo album, Black On Both Sides, leaves more to talk about than can ever be written in a review. Buried in every track are layers of detail varying in a massive range of musical genres that are very exciting to listen to, while simultaneously containing a huge library of samples and lyrics referencing both emcees before his time and artists still producing music like Eric B. and Rakim, Wu-Tang Clan, his own Black Star, even Red Hot Chili Peppers, and more you'll find yourself ecstatically pointing out if you have an eclectic collection of earlier hip hop works. All this does not mention the artists featured throughout the albums' tracks like ATCQ's Q-Tip, Busta Rhymes, and his Black Star brother Talib Kweli. All these elements combine into the perfect palette for Mos to craft into one of hip hop's most dynamic album ever released. But then he had to put it all together...

In creating albums using a massive amount of producers to put an album together, two things can happen: one way, it might yield a few listenable songs but typically ruins the theme of the album. This did not happen with Black On Both Sides, because the only other way an album can unfold is for the producers, including DJ Premier and Diamond D, to conform to the central hub of the album, which, for Black On Both Sides, is Mos Def, who is on point from the beginning to the end, and every beat in between. This album represents gears and cogs machined by different hip hop producers' mental factories that they brought together for Mos Def to dynamically color, construct, and energize into an engine, fueled by his own lethal mixture of intelligence and lyricism in order to output a work of art you will enjoy and hold onto forever.

If the world was ending, and on the last ship leaving Earth, we were forced to grab an album from each genre to preserve and recreate music at the new civilization we were going to build, we would be leaving with Mos Def's Black On Both Sides as a template to ensure hip hop in the new galaxy was created correctly. It's flawless. It's brilliant. It's timelessly energetic. It's testament that he mastered his craft before the spotlight warmed up. Let the Mighty Mos Def's speech bang your world into shape and let it fall, just to see what it feels like to be Black On Both Sides.

Hopefully this masterpiece will be back in stock soon. Had a copy of it a while ago but it had a skip in it, so I gave it to my local record store. Would love to have it again, though.

Just got my copy a few days ago. Enough has been already said about the album itself, but the quality of the pressing is just top notch. Highly recommended!

I have a copy of this and I'm pretty sure it's one of the 'unofficial UK' represses. No liner notes or sticker on the front. Can't really make a solid identification other than that though. The quality of the pressing itself is great though, so I can't complain too much.

amazing pressing of an amazing album. no flaws in my copy to speak of. it's heavy - def 180 gram