I entered the Great Entertainer billiards hall to interview Brooklyn's Mos Def who is currently Rawkus Records' vanguard artist. Mos first stepped on the scene when he appeared on De La Soul's classic "Stakes Is High" album. Scanning around the corny pizza party industry "meet & greet", we saw hide nor hair of Mos. I approached the rep from Rawkus and my journalistic partner, Steve, who bridges the generation gap between my thirty-year-old ass and rappers in their mid-twenties, escaped the industry nad-riding session to see what the video arcade was like. Once in the arcade, Steve immediatley spied the brotha Mos Def in the corner of the room banging buttons and putting up high scores on an old "Centipede" game.

Unable to find Mos Def or Steve, I finally tracked the two youths enmeshed in a serious Ms. Pac-Man. As I approached, Mos was dropping science to Steve regarding video game strategy, "See...the creepy crawlies move faster than Ms. Pac-Man. She's at a disadvantage." I quickly interrupted to ask Mos Def about his debut album which is dropping later this year on Rawkus. "I'm sorta iffy with titles 'cuz I get a new one every eight days or so," he explains with a wide grin on his face. "But I got Ali Shaheed, Shawn J. Period, 88 Keys, alotta other dope cats. I'm doing some production myself. I can't even really describe what thealbum's gonna be like. It's real different. Real different."

The word 'different' can be used to describe Mos Def himself. In these times of money-flaunters and wanna-be-pop rappers, Mos is none of the above. His fun-loving style of MCing is obviously influenced by the old-school, and he has fond memories of the early eighties and the Hip Hop scene that first attracted him to rhyming at the age of nine.

"It was '82-'83. It was Run-DMC, Spoonie Gee. It was underground radio. Hip Hop. The Rap Attack. It was very concentrated from week to week, there was so and so coming out. It was always fresh." He aslo was no stranger to the dancing styles of the times. "I was Poppin'. Definitely. My name was Kid Lock-A-Lot. I had a crew called RTD. I had a Pac-Man suit (laughs). It was beautiful. You know. It was ours. It was mine. It wasn't my parents'. It was mine. And it was beautiful."

Mos Def set himself firmly on the Hip Hop map when he dropped his first single on Rawkus, 'The Universal Magnetic.' With hype lyrics and a beautifully crafted track by Shawn J. Period, Mos developed a dedicated underground following. Many heads, however, first heard him on the De La Soul album. Track Thirteen, 'Big Brother Beat.' "Yeah. Off 'Stakes is High.' They were talking about making it into a single but it didn't happen. Whatever. But it was a good song. I had a lot of fun doing it. Skeff Anderson did the beat. I also did the remix to 'Stakes' on the b-side of 'Itsoweezee.' Jay Dee did a DOPE, dope track."

Since his inclusion into Native Tongues (the rap collective which includes De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest among others), Mos Def has been gaining props non-stop. Released in the summer, the single and video for 'Body Rock,' featuring Q-Tip and Tosh, gained him much attention. This single, like his first, brought Mos together with producer Shawn J. Period, whom he met through a mutual friend.

"Well, I was working on the Bush Babees album, 'S.O.S.' 'The Love Song,' and the intro, too...and me and Khalil from the Bush Babees, we go back a good way and he was like, 'Yo, there's this cat, Shawn J. Period, and he's real tight. I'm doing something with him.' And that's how I first became aware of Shawn. We met and we really hit it off and we got real real tight. And he opened up his war chest of beats and I was like 'whoa!' He was like 'Yo, I'd love for you to rhyme on my beats and I was like, 'Yeah, I'd love to rhyme on 'em.' And that's how me and Shawn hooked up."

Before all of this, Mos could be seen every week on 'The Cosby Mysteries.' Known for acting as well as rapping, the multi-talented admits he was interested in both during his high school years. "It all happened pretty simultaneously. I was rhyming and I caught the acting bug when I was like fifteen in high school. It was all happening consecutively. I was writing rhymes and taking acting class. I stopped writing rhymes for a minute and starting writing poems and short stories and stuff, then came back to writing rhymes." The acting classes paid off when Mos became a regular on the weekly series as a "brown shoe" with Bill Cosby. "I wasworking on a show called 'Here And Now' that Malcolm Jamal Warner was in and Mr. C was producing it. They were gonna put me up as a regular on the show and then the show got canceled. So Mr. C was like 'What are you getting into' and I said, 'Nothin'. Just chillin.' About a year and a half later this 'Cosby Mysteries' came up. It started out as just a pilot and they made it into a series. And that's what you see today as the 'Cosby Mysteries.'"

Mos, together with his boy Talib Kweli, form the group 'Blackstar.' The album is definitely working to whet people's appetites for his solo debut, which has Shawn J. Period as well as other well-known producers in Hip Hop. "Yeah, I got some definite production. I'm looking to work with Q-Tip and Pos (of De La Soul), and Ali already did a joint for me."

It's easy to tell by his smile that Mos is proud to be working with artists that he grew up listening to and admiring. "They're still the people I look up to, but now I work with them. I see it as 'kind go to kind.' They (De La Soul) were definitely speaking on the same wavelength. It's a good thing."

Though Mos is definitely taking his Hip Hop in another direction, he shies away from any labels as a savior of the music. "I think there's a group of people, not just me independently, who are tyring to do some new and exciting things in regards to Hip Hop or what Hip Hop has to offer. Kweli's one of them. Shabaam (Saadiq), Company Flow, and Smut Peddlers. So many dope cats. So, the state of Hip Hop is the state of the people. If people don't get off the nonsense and the bullshit, the music ain't gonna do it either, because the people make Hip Hop. It's not like Hip Hop is independent of people. I say that all the time. Until people get of the bullshit, Hip Hop is gonna be where it's at. Hip Hop is only gonna reflect whatever we do and where we're at."

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