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It’s no secret that fans have been salivating at the mere mention of a Black Star II album. Though there’s no confirmation that the sequel to Talib Kweli and Mos Def’s classic debut will ever happen, fans at Baltimore’s Sonar club on Wednesday easily conceded to see them on stage together for the first time in years.

Mos Def is hitting major cities promoting, The Ecstatic, an album featuring an amalgamation of adventuresome lyrics and instrumentals. Baltimore, MD, and Philadelphia, PA, were treated with set openers: the enigmatic and ingeniously comedic Jay Electronica and Talib and Hi-Tek, who are back together again as Reflection Eternal, finishing up their upcoming album, Revolutions Per Minute.

 At Sonar, as the standing-only crowd waits, the stage is shrouded in red lights. The spotlight shines on a drummer, blithely but furiously pounding the bass and snare drums with percussion mallets. It’s Mos Def and he’s rocking out before he leads into an evocation of Malcolm X’s 1964 speech at Oxford University from Ecstatic’s intro track, “Supermagic”: You’re are living  at a time of extremism, A time of revolution, A time when there’s got to be change.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEpcweXVJh8. It’s a fitting opening song in a week where the fury of healthcare reform has reached a feverish pitch, but its Rep. Joe Wilson and Kanye West’s outburts that are dominating the headlines.

There’s typical hip hop fare: pacing back and forth across stage and little creativity in costume (he rocked a white t-shirt, black jeans, and dressed it up with black Derby hat) or set design, but Mos changes it up throughout, switching from singing-often evoking the spirit of field hollers- to rapping fluidly, to instrumentals ranging from Indian music to reggae to blues, which sometimes leaves the swaying crowd awed but a bit confounded as to what dance moves to pull out. 

So he brings fans back to a time where clever lyricism could also have a danceable beat with “Umi Says,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcxLFXbECsY and Ecstatic’s stand-out, the Madlib produced “Auditorium,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UT-hYXqTN38 which samples from Madlib’s instrumental album, Beat Konducta Vol. 3-4: Beat Konducta in India, and a guest appearance from Slick Rick posing as a soldier stationed in Iraq holding court with an Iraqi child who muses frankly: Give me my oil and get the f*& out of my country.

Notable omissions from the show: Black on Both Sides radio friendly, “Miss Fat Booty,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFyTzjJDeCk, and “No Hay Nada Mas,” a track from Ecstatic where he rhymes effortlessly entirely in Spanish, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pwL7rPsJG4.

But all is forgiven when Mos and Talib Kweli team up onstage for the classics. But right before they dive in , Mos Def digresses into a Kanye sympathizer:

“I don’t care what nobody says, that’s my homie!” he yells to incessant boo’s. “He didn’t slap that girl. He expressed a sentiment that you were sitting at home feeling! He was having an ODB moment! This song is for Kanye,” he says as he and Talib launch into ”Definition,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rx5aVI2zsFE and follow it with “Brown-Skin Lady, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjsotGlbnus, and the soon-to-be classic, “History,” Talib and Mos Def’s reunion on Ecstatic produced by the late J Dilla  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdqG6EfOe6g.

If Mos didn’t prove that quality hip hop can do anything, outside of getting radio play, he ended the show dancing to a medley of classics, including Earth, Wind, and Fire’s “September,” and paying tribute to MJ by singing “Beat It,” and “Billie Jean,” and making some magic by moon walking…on the carpet! Talib said it best on Reflection Eternal’s new single, “Back Again,”…”we back again, you can like rap again, you can say that again.”

This story is filed under: Entertainment, Pop Vultures