Yasiin Bey’s The Ecstatic Returns From Digital Exile — and Still Sounds Like the Future

Seven years in digital exile stranded Yasiin Bey’s fourth studio album in the bureaucratic nowhere between existence and recognition.

The Ecstatic disappeared from major platforms like Spotify and Apple Music a decade after Downtown Records originally released it under his former Mos Def moniker in 2009. The Brooklyn MC later explained that its ownership had passed out of corporate hands, and the album would only return on terms he set. His qualms with the “exploitative” economics of digital service providers have only deepened since then, as lopsided profitability models tighten their grip on the music business.

Now, for the first time since 2019, The Ecstatic is available to stream exclusively on Qobuz while also returning to print through Rhymesayers Entertainment. Estrangement from the general public, however, has done little to dull its force.

A well-traveled passport on wax, the record bears stamps from every corner of the world. Turkish psych-rock, Lebanese fusion, Bollywood playback, Brazilian funk, and classic American soul changed hands across control rooms manned by some of hip-hop’s most inventive beatmakers. But the record isn’t merely well-traveled. Its disregard for musical borders is inseparable from a preoccupation with sociopolitical ones.

“Supermagic” opens the LP with Malcolm X arguing that the pursuit of a just civic order hinges on extreme measures: “I, for one, will join in with anyone — don’t care what color you are — as long as you want to change this miserable condition that exists on this Earth.” Then Oh No drops in a swirling guitar riff from “İnce İnce” by Selda Bağcan.

Later, “Quiet Dog Bite Hard” quotes another formidable dissident. Nigerian artist Fela Kuti explains that attempts to bend him toward compromise have only strengthened his resolve, setting up the percussion to gradually deepen over the next few minutes. The climax recoils every time it’s approached, never granting the release it keeps promising. The buildup itself becomes the payoff as the hushed “simmer down” chant swells into a rallying cry, each repetition coaxing the blood hotter in defiance of its own command.

That friction between harmony and confrontation courses through The Ecstatic, and change is presented as an inherently radical idea.

“Workers Comp.” approaches capitalism with more levity by fusing labor anxiety with deadpan humor before dissolving into its murkier companion piece. Michael Drake’s “Colours” supplies the throbbing undercurrent on “Revelations” as Bey fires at war, banks and institutional power, with each call for peace bristling with enough indignation to stare down the violence it seeks to extinguish.

Although direct references to politics do occasionally recede, the instinct to explore no-go zones persists at every turn.

Whereas “Life in Marvelous Times” measures Bey’s upbringing in New York City against the curious splendor of modern chaos, “Auditorium” runs a Bollywood sample underneath a verse about the Iraq War. Madlib scoops a few seconds from between Lata Mangeshkar’s vocals on “Do Jhoot Jiye Ek Sach Ke Liye” and transmutes them into one of hip-hop’s richest arrangements. Over it, Slick Rick never once registers above room temperature as he surveys the turmoil of American military intervention in the Middle East.

“Wahid” keeps that geographic restlessness in motion before “The Embassy” pushes it farther still a few numbers down. Co-produced by Mr. Flash and Bey himself, “The Embassy” starts in charted territory before Ihsan al-Munzer’s “The Joy of Lina” abruptly nudges the album to its most distant coordinates. By the time the original running order comes to a close, the adaptation of Banda Black Rio’s “Casa Forte” barely even announces itself as another continental jump.

The album’s impulse for thrifting isn’t confined to sound. Its red-washed cover image of a boy leaping between rooftops was lifted from Charles Burnett’s 1977 film Killer of Sheep, a portrait of Black working-class life in Watts. In poetic symmetry, freezing motion makes sense for a project perpetually leaping between structures without landing on one.

Cognito, who documented The Ecstatic era, remembers how certain Bey was about that particular still. He watched the film afterward and understood why. He had an unusually close view of the album while it was still being stitched together, attending studio sessions and even traveling to South Africa with the rapper to capture photographs that now fill a 120-page hardcover book packaged as part of Rhymesayers’ deluxe reissue.