damn homie
they treatin Yasiin Bey like Marcus Garvey now
The rapper Mos Def, now known as Yasiin Bey, has cancelled an upcoming tour of the United States, with promoters citing "legal" issues.
The Together music festival in Boston wrote on its website: "We regret to inform you that due to immigration/legal issues Yasiin Bey is unable to enter back into the United States and his upcoming US tour has been canceled."
The details of the issues were not specified. Bey no longer lives in the US, having moved to South Africa. He recently told Rolling Stone about the move: "I lived in Brooklyn 33 years of my life. I thought I'd be buried in that place. And around seven years ago, I was like, you know, 'I gotta go, I gotta leave.' It's very hard to leave. And I lived in a lot of places: Central America, North America, Europe for a while. And I came to Cape Town in 2009 and it just hit me. I was like, 'Yeah.' I know when a good vibe gets to you. And, you know, I thought about this place every day from when I left.
"I'm not here just for like middle-class comfort, you know. Sure, it's a beautiful place, you got the ocean, the mountain, the botanical garden, the beautiful people, the history, the culture, the struggle and everything — maaan, let me tell you something, for a guy like me, who had five or six generations not just in America but in one town in America, to leave America, things gotta be not so good with America."
Bey has previously lamented tour immigration issues, blaming institutional racism, on the track Mr Nigga: "But I go over seas and I get over-seized / London, Heathrow, me and my people / They think that illegal's a synonym for negro."
As well as a hip-hop career that spawned classic solo albums as well as highly-regarded LPs with Talib Kweli as Black Star, Bey has also appeared in numerous movies. His next project is Life of Crime, a kind of prequel to Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown; Bey plays an earlier version of Samuel L. Jackson's character Ordell Robbie in an adaptation of Elmore Leonard's book The Switch, which also stars Jennifer Aniston, John Hawkes, Isla Fisher and Tim Robbins. He also appears in Begin Again (previously known as Can A Song Save Your Life?), a musical drama starring Keira Knightly and Mark Ruffalo about a record producer nurturing a broken-hearted young songwriter.
