The Ecstatic: Mos Def.

People looking for offhanded symbolism can feel free to try tracking Mos Def's career trajectory as an MC through his album covers. Iconic solo debut Black on Both Sides: a stark, immediately-striking photo portrait that renders the attribution of his name unnecessary. Aggro experimental follow-up The New Danger: that same face now obscured by a stick-up man's mask, his bright red bloody-looking index fingertip pointing to his own head on some Taxi Driver shit. Contractual obligation mishap True Magic: no actual album art whatsoever, with a blank looking Mos staring into space off the surface of the disc itself. And now -The Ecstatic, which depicts not MosDef himself but a red tinted shot from Charles Burnett's classic 1977 film Killer of Sheep. You might go so far as to say this indicates that the best way for Mos Def to reassert what he really means as an artist would be to take his as-seen-in Hollywood face out of the equation entirely, replacing it with a shot from an entirely different strain of independent, neorealist cinema that more clearly gets at what he represents as a lyricist. Maybe it's a stretch, but what the hell. And while Burnett's Watts isn't quite the same place as Mos Def's Bed-Stuy, it does exist as one of many geographical reference points in The Ecstatic's international style. This is Mos Def's small - globe statement, an album that comfortably jumps stylistically across continents on a hip-hop goodwill-ambassador tour,prefaced by a statement from Malcolm X during his 1964 appearance at Oxford: "I, for one, will join in with anyone, I don't care what color you are, as long as you want to change this miserable condition that exists on this earth." It's a high-minded intro for an album that most people will hearfirst and foremost as the comeback bid of a rapper-turned-actor, but it also serves as an important indication that Mos actually gives a shit here, and that he has a stake in something greater than just one corner of the rap world.