Yasiin Bey is among Hip Hop’s most prized MCs, and he has now shared his thoughts on one of the culture’s current leading voices.
During a Patreon-exclusive interview with The Cutting Room Floor that went live on Wednesday (January 10), the Brooklyn native discussed modern rap and the person at its forefront.
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“Drake is pop to me,” he told host Recho Omondi. “In the sense like, if I was in Target in Houston and I heard a Drake song, it feels like a lot of his music is compatible with shopping. Or shopping with an edge, in certain instances.”
Though Bey did refer to the Canadian superstar’s music as “likeable,” he and Omondi had fun joking around about the idea of music that is an ideal backdrop for commerce.
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“I love this mall!” Bey laughingly exclaimed. “They have everything here. This is the new Drake — you hear it?”
Turning serious, Bey suggested that music for shopping may not be relevant during “the collapse of empire.”
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“Are we not in some early stage of that at this present hour?” he asked. “Buying and selling — where’s the message that I can use? What’s in it for your audience?”
As for those he outright admires, the 50-year-old rapper and actor will be performing a setlist comprising only MF DOOM covers at a one-night-only concert in France next week.
On January 18, the Black Star MC (formerly known as Mos Def) will put on an exclusive show at the La Cigale theatre in Paris dedicated to his late peer.
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An Instagram post announcing the show reads: “Yasiin Bey always showed admiration to the rhymes of who’s been called Viktor Vaughan, The Villain, King Gheedorah or simply DOOM. He will perform some of his favorite tracks from the Masked One.”
To that point, there’s a famous video on YouTube of Bey talking about his love for MF DOOM in which he claimed that the Mm..Food spitter was a better rapper than Lil Wayne.
“I’d bet a million dollars on DOOM against Lil Wayne,” he said. “He rhymes as weird as I feel. When I saw that Madvillain record, I bought it on vinyl and I didn’t even have a record player. I bought it just to stare at the album. I stared at it and I just kept going, ‘I understand it.’
“’Cause, you know, I was a teenager growing up listening to [John Coltrane’s] Love Supreme and [Miles Davis’] Bitches Brew and [Charles Mingus’] The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, but I was also rhyming.”
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MF DOOM (real name Daniel Dumile) passed away at the age of 49 in October 2020 after suffering from respiratory problems. Last year, it was revealed that he died from angioedema, a rare side effect of blood pressure medication.
