Since his emergence on the national stage in the late 1990s, Yasiin Bey (formerly Mos Def) has garnered a reputation as of the most respected rappers and a highly respected actor. Mos Def, born Dante Smith on December 11, 1973 in Brooklyn, New York is the eldest of 12 children and stepchildren. Mos Def and several of his siblings grew up with his mother in the Brooklyn projects, while several of his other siblings grew up with their father in New Jersey.
“I began to fear that Mos Def was being treated as a product, not a person, so I’ve been going by Yasiin since ’99,” he said. “At first it was just for friends and family, but now I’m declaring it openly.”
Coming of age at the height of the crack epidemic in the 1980’s, a young Mos Def was surrounded by violence, addiction and crime. Reflecting on his childhood home, the rapper later said, “I believe the projects were a social experiment; we were laboratory rats stacked on top of each other, and people just knew, inherently, that there was something wrong.”
Despite the dangers surrounding him, he managed to steer clear of violence and drugs, pursuing a different path to prosperity through his early passion for the arts. Mos Def was determined to overcome the circumstances of his upbringing: “I remember being seven years old and looking out that window, thinking, ‘I’m gonna make some money.’ Because we were good people.”
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In 1982, at the age of nine, he simultaneously developed an appreciation for theater and hip-hop. “That was the first year I wrote a rhyme,” he later recalled, “and it was also the year that I first saw Wild Style—in the theater, in the Bronx, with my mom. The place was packed. I lived for a summer in the Bronx, and you can’t really describe that time and the energy and have it mean all that it did. It falls short. New York was another type of place, and hip-hop was local, community music, public-access channel. It was a culture that came up in a city on the decline.”
Mos Def credits his parents with guiding him away from such negative content. His father has been advising him on…
…professional decisions for several years now. “My parents have been vocal and influential in all the decisions I made in my life,” says Mos. “It made sense to me to include [my father] officially and to include my mother officially cause she’d been there from the beginning. You need to have that synergy–because who really cares the most about you?”
Even while filming alongside Bill Cosby in the series, “The Cosby Mysteries” (1994-1995) by day, Mos Def immersed himself in the blossoming New York hip-hop scene at night. It was at this time that he first assumed the stage name “Mos Def,” short for “most definitely,” and formed a rap group called Urban Thermo Dynamics alongside one of his brothers, D.c.Q., and the female rapper Ces. They performed in small venues and underground showcases while attempting to break through to larger audiences.
Throughout the early 2000s, Mos appeared in films such as Bamboozled (2000), Monster’s Ball (2001) and The Italian Job (2003). In 2004, Mos Def portrayed groundbreaking heart surgeon Vivien Thomas in the HBO miniseries Something the Lord Made, a role that earned him both Emmy and Golden Globe Award nominations for Best Actor.
In addition to his work as an actor and rapper, from 2002 through 2007, Mos Def served as the host of the televised spoken-word program Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry.
“My work is a reflection of the human condition,” Mos Def says. “I don’t want to hurt anybody. I don’t want to mislead people. I want to tell the truth. All my songs are not happy. Some of them are even aggressive—some may say mean, but we all experience these feelings in life. I’m just being honest about what I feel and what sounds and ideas were motivating me at the time.”
“I just try to stay around the right people,” says Mos. “I try to stay around family…[try] to stay around people who believe what I believe and [beg] Allah to help me.”
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