Mos definition5/15/2023 ![]() For Mos Def, it's important to understand these numbers, but it's dehumanizing when people start to become numbers: Lines like "eight-year-olds getting caught with 9 mills" or "Four MC's murdered in the last four years / I ain't tryin to be the fifth one" take the sort of depressing stuff off the newsstands and remind us that it's real. He uses the numbers in striking ways to show that they are more than just numbers. In 2007, a disturbing census analysis showed that there were three times as many Blacks in jail or prison than in college dorms.Įven though we think it's really cool to use this many statistics in a rap song, Mos Def isn't just trying to make an abstract point about statistics. In 1980, there were fewer than 400,000 people locked up in the U.S., but by 2000, there were about two million. Even in places where crime rates have steadied out or gone down, prison populations have often continued to grow, usually affecting people of color disproportionately. The profitability of prisons creates an obvious problem: because of the "grow or die" principle for big corporations, the prison system can't actually reduce the number of people locked up without putting business in a bind. Private prisons remain a small minority in state-run prisons, the business element is more about jobs for correctional officers and contracts for companies who provide things like food, clothing, and security technology to prisons. Beginning in the 1980s, a trend toward turning public services over to private companies (a process known as "privatization") meant that some prisons were no longer run by the government, but by corporations. The issue of prison and jail comes up a lot in "Mathematics." What does Mos Def mean by jail economy? Another phrase he uses for it is "prison-industry complex." Both phrases describe how prisons and incarceration have become a big business in the U.S. ![]() People in the ghetto, he says, are "Bubblin crack, jewel theft and robbery to combat poverty / And end up in the global jail economy." (We spell out a lot more of what Mos Def says in our Lyrics section, too.) He brings in most of the key urban issues of the 1980s and 1990s: AIDS, unemployment, the crack cocaine epidemic, gangs, public housing, and the massive increase in policing and incarceration that came along with "tough on crime" legislation and the War on Drugs. But many of the figures named are insidious numbers and proportions that describe the effects of poverty, drugs and racism on urban Black communities ("the white unemployment rate is nearly more than triple for Black"). Some of the numbers are harmless statistics ("40% of Americans own a cell phone") or clever shout-outs ("6 million ways to die" is from a Snoop Dogg song). "Mathematics" walks us through a series of increasingly huge numbers in order to paint a picture of some of the key social injustices Mos Def saw around him in the late 1990s. Sometimes, it's also about interpreting the information we're given. But, as Mos Def shows us, that's not all there is to numbers. It took us here at Shmoop a pretty long time to figure out all the figures and facts he cites, and we didn't even have to add, subtract, or multiply. ![]() "Mathematics" has all these elements, but mostly we just have to hand it to him for one thing: the song is just plain smart. As one of the leading voices in conscious hip-hop, Mos Def can be playful, profound, and preachy in equal parts. ![]()
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