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Saturday, March 01, 2003

By Ed Masley, Post-Gazette Pop Music Critic

On "Get By," his upcoming single, Talib Kweli paints a picture of what's going on as bleak as anything this side of Stevie Wonder's "Living in the City." Lamenting the things people do to get by, he comes out rapping about selling "crack to our own out the back of our homes," then turns around and hits you with a gospel-flavored message of hope, parting the clouds with "This morning, I woke up feeling brand new/I jumped up, feeling my highs and my lows and my soul and my goal is just to stop smoking and stop drinking."

	Talib Kweli "... I try very hard not to become preachy in my music and just paint realistic pictures."

Taken from his underrated major-label debut, "Quality," it's just the sort of song that's earned Kweli a reputation based, in part, on words such as "consciousness" and "positivity."

He really hates that kind of talk.

"It gets overwhelming to have those prefixes in front of you," he says. "I get labeled a lot. But I try very hard not to become preachy in my music and just paint realistic pictures."

Still, there is a track on "Quality" where Kweli raps, "I wanna write the songs that right the wrong."

So how much righting of the wrong does he think a record can do?

"That's just optimistic," Kweli says. "It's like that old ... I think it's either Elton John or the Beatles ... I don't remember ... but 'We write the songs that make the whole world sing.' It's like as a songwriter, that's what you strive for. You strive to write those type of songs. Or even better, 'Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure,' when they made a group, Wild Stallions, and they played music and it aligns everything and makes everything good. It's real fantastic and real kind of silly, but that's the kind of optimism that you want to have when you're working on a piece of music, because that's the kind of feelings you want to give people."

There's another cut on "Quality" called "Joy" where Kweli celebrates the joy of parenthood, a sentiment that's not as rare in hip-hop as you may think -- according to Kweli, anyway.

"In hip-hop, you'll find that people who have children more often than not talk about them on their records," he says. "But stuff like that is downplayed for stuff that is a little more for the dance floor. So sometimes you don't even hear people's songs on the album that are expressing true feelings." Asked how he feels about expressing those true feelings only to be outsold by a guy like Eminem or 50 Cent, he refuses the bait and says, "There's no accident to why they're there. They're there 'cause they're some of the best and they work very hard. 50's been through a lot of [expletive] and now is just his time. Eminem, I've seen the [expletive] he went through."

Then, with a laugh, he adds. "They're both older than me. You know, it's all good."

If there is a hip-hop artist Kweli thinks is less inclined to share true feelings on a record, he's not about to tell some journalist about it.

Not like Common, who joins Kweli, Gang Starr and Floetry tomorrow night at Metropol. (The show starts at 8. Information: 412-323-1919.)

Common was recently quoted in Rolling Stone complaining about how desperate some hip-hop artists are to please the crowd, saying, "I worry when people are able to imitate hip-hop so well on 'Saturday Night Live' skits -- it means we have set this culture up to be just one thing. We limit hip-hop to just one look, one uniform, one statement of being real: getting money and guns and women, or selling dope all the time."

Kweli's reactions?

"Common speaks a lot about that in his music. ... He's becoming free with himself, and he no longer wants to do music that's just about what the audience wants. I think when you do that too often, the audience can see through it. You've got to be honest with yourself. It's not about pleasing the fans. I mean, of course, getting on stage is, entertaining is, but not writing songs."