Don't Be Afraid of the Boogie Man: Identity Creation in Mos Def's The New Danger (Which is Dope)

I’ve been listening to Mos Def’s 2004 album The New Danger almost exclusively for the past 6-8 weeks. If you look in the front seat cup holders in my discolored, shaky 1996 Honda Accord, you’ll find the CD case propped against the gear shifter, the faded insert artwork revealing Mos’s long right index finger pointed at his dark right temple like a 9-millimeter. During my drive to work/school/Thought-Land, I ritualistically play tracks 9, 15, and 18 (entitled “Sunshine,” “Life is Real,” and “Champion Requiem,” respectively), and almost always in that order. The medley has become a type of intellectual prayer, a meditation that settles my mind into a bluish black calm. And the calm has enough poetry to drown out the suburban static sizzling up from the summer asphalt. Here’s the doctrine behind the practice: The first track in the lineup gets me ready for the thinking of the day, the second gives me the courage to keep thinking in the face of the alluring pleasures of not-thinking, and the last track promises that all the thinking (the struggle) will be worth it at the end of the day.

            

Mos Def (birth name Dante Smith) is listed as one of the 150 “things” white people “like” in Christian Lander’s aptly titled 2008 book Stuff White People Like: The Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions. In the hip-hop artist’s half-page entry, Lander hypothesizes that Def’s popularity among “hip” young white folks stems from the fact that he is the perfect combination of underground coolness, poetic genius, and crossover appeal (did you know he co-starred opposite Mark Wahlberg in the 2003 remake of the Italian Job!). While in months and years past I have worried about what being a Mos Def fan says about my socio-racial identity, after having The New Danger on blast for the last 40-60 straight days I have come to prioritize how the artist’s music works to self-identify over how being a fan of said music helps me identify myself.

           

Most rappers perform under assumed names, and Smith is no exception. He has long been known as Mos Def, “The Mighty Mos,” or simply “Mos,” and I recently read that in the future he would like to be addressed as Yasiin Bey (a nod to Smith’s Islamic roots/ties). But throughout The New Danger, Smith/Def/Bey introduces several new monikers/personas/characters into the fray, the most interesting and ominous being the mysterious Boogie Man. On the album’s first track, Mos croons, “I am the most beautiful boogie man,” and in the process introduces listeners to the artist’s contrasting and at times paradoxical identity representations.

            Traditionally, the boogie man (or boogey man) is the amorphous representation of everything humanity is most afraid of. It is the darkness that lurks under our childhood beds at night, it is the thing that scares us into acting according to social or authoritative norms (if we didn’t behave our parents the boogie man surely would have gotten us at some point in our childhoods, right?). In announcing himself, or his rap alter ego, as Boogie Man, is Def warning us that we should fear him? Or is he ironically using a culturally understood representation of fear to play on the historically terrifying notion of a black man who can speak his mind whether white folks like it or not?

            

Besides being the modern(ish) rap world’s “favorite nightmare,” Mos makes several more identity claims throughout The New Danger. He calls himself “Black Dante” on one track, and then on another (track 06 – “Blue Black Jack”) he tells the blues tale of a bad man named “Black Jack Johnson” who may or may not be a heavyweight champion archetype the rapper connects with in his moments of lyrical brilliancy.

But beyond the explicit identities Mos Def claims in the titles and hooks of his songs, it is the subtle self-evaluations sprinkled throughout The New Danger that make the rapper’s identifications the most compelling. Take, for example, his bombastic, contradictory self-definition on “Ghetto Rock”:

I am a fighter and a lover

I’m the freaky baby daddy

I’m a bad motherfucker

I’m the earth, wind, fire, and the thunder

I said I am, go ask my mother

You don’t believe that shit

Believe what you wanna

Def tells us he is what he is, and if we don’t believe him we can ask the woman who birthed him (or we can simply check the weather patterns). And herein lies the strength of many of the songs on The New Danger. So many rap songs involve a man (modern rap music in all its fractured glory is unfortunately often, as Suge Knight once said “a man’s game.”) talking about what he could be or what he would be if he had this car or this amount of money or this sexual conquest notched on his mahogany bedpost. Mos Def bypasses the speculation and preaches what he is: a conflicted human being, a child of the universe, and at the same time a force of nature. Shouldn’t all artists/writers strive to identify in a similar way?

           

Over the past several months I have realized how important it is for word-people to identify themselves when they create stuff, even if this means creating personas to create under/as (like Def’s infamous Boogie Man). “Why,” you may ask, “is it important for us to understand who we are when we’re making stuff? Isn’t it only important that we’re making stuff?”

            Reality is a bastard. By this I mean, for many creative people, the real and the unreal tend to blur when they make their art. “What’s more real, the stuff I see in the ‘real’ world or the things I think in my head (I feel like we need another I Heart Huckabees clip here for clarification)?” “Is it better to be a realist or an idealist?” “Do I make stuff because I think things, or do I think things because I make stuff?” These questions can haunt the artist/writer, and sometimes it’s good to lay down the existential law:

  

  1.     I exist.

  2.     How do I know for sure?

  3.     Because I have this identity (be it “natural” or created).

  4.     How am I sure I have an identity?

  5.     Because my identity makes stuff

  6.     (Insert stuff made.)

In a mode of backwards reasoning, Mos declares in “Life is Real”

            What I spit and I write is real

            Cause my life is real

As creative people, we don’t need to completely freak about reality (I hope), because we can always be sure that our works exist and our identities exist (even when, or perhaps especially when, we can’t wrap our head around the existence of anything else). The two (our identities and our identities’ work) work in tandem to prove each other’s is-ness, and they also work to do good work for other people (I hope).

            Ok so we have our identities and we have their created works, so what? Surprisingly, an answer can be found in the first bars of Mos’s “Ghetto Rock.” The answer is: the work and its creator function at their highest level when the work is undeniable.

            The haters can’t fuck wit it

Cause they mom and they sister

And girl in love wit it.

The goal as creative people is to make things that editors/professors/critics/various Powers-That-Be/haters can’t quiet/stifle/ “fuck wit” because of the work’s universally powerful appeal. Work like this is difficult to categorize/compartmentalize/name because even if critics don’t like it personally, all the people in their families and friendly circles can’t get enough of it. It is this work that we should strive to create. No longer is it enough to simply “write what we know.” We need to make what others want and need to know and, most importantly, what they can’t deny. This work will be remembered and recognized as culturally helpful, the stuff people can’t or shouldn’t do without.