The Islet Brothers & Mos Def - Beauty In The Dark

I've been bumping this for a while: it's on my favourite sex/slushy mixtape, DJ Eufonik's Things You Do To Me.

Close harmony, and Mos Def's lyrics, make for a tight little R'n'B number. This is such a good wind-down song.

Mos Def - Ms. Fat Booty

This is from the dying days of the Golden Age: 1999. It's built on an Aretha Franklin sample, which has been chopped up like sushi. It's good.

Mos Def is in full-on parable mode here, to good narrative effect. I want to play this in a convertible one day before I die.

Ski Beats ft. Mos Def - Cream Of The Planet

I think rap and brass make a nicely strident counterpoint, and this track proves it. The lyrics are everything you'd expect from Mos Def - chains of nouns, motifs and cosmic imagery, building into something beautiful.

Ski Beatz has a patchy discography, but this instrumental is phenomenal - all complex melodies winding around one another, like an anthem for ghetto angels.

Mos Def - Can You See The Light

The other day, someone said to me that they only like hip-hop from the Golden Age. Sigh. Why should anything produced after 1997 be inherently inferior? I refuse to believe that we're living in some kind of hip-hop Dark Ages in which there is only rape (Horrorcore), pillage (Gangsta) and sanctimony (Backpack rap). There's more than that.

That said, a little throw-back to boom-bap does sound really good, especially on a sunny afternoon. That delicious instrumental is the work of DJ Krush - Japan's first hip-hop DJ, with a life story that would make gangsters squirm. Mos Def goes suitably old-school on the vocal - chanted, simple, rhythmic, shout-outs. This is one to bump in your car. Or in my case, on my bicycle. I really need to grow up.

Mos Def - No Hay Nada Mas

This is a free-verse composition in Spanish, by an English speaker, about metaphysics. Sounds pretentious and doomed to failure, right?

But it's got the magic touch of Mos Def, who has come up with two of my favourite couplets ever:

"familia, crianza, la luz en la distancia... mi vista, mi casa, mis suenos, mi alma"
"family, childhood, the light in the distance... my view, my home, my dreams, my soul"

Blackstar ft. Common - Respiration

This is a love letter to youth and New York. And, as if that weren't enough, the intro is in Spanish, and the video is monochrome. Arty indeedy. The lyrics are so intricate: I think "hard knuckles on the second hands of working-class watches" might be my favourite line ever.