“I’m retiring the Mos Def name after 2011. I’m actually doing it. Yasiin. That’s it. Mos Def is a name that I built and cultivated over the years, it’s a name that the streets taught me, a figure of speech that was given to me by the culture and by my environment, and I feel I’ve done quite a bit with that name and it’s time to expand and move on. Also, I didn’t want to have to deal with having any moniker or separation between the self that I see and know myself as.”
Def, whose real name is Dante Terrell Smith, is rumored to have rejected the following new names before finally settling on Yasiin:
– M. Deffy
– Dante Culdeffer
– Mas Tacos
Anyway, here he is discussing the name change with MTV…
