Talib Kweli & Rick Ross Look To Enlighten Only The Lonely On “Heads Up Eyes Open” (Video)

Whether he’s done it solo or in collaboration with some of the biggest names in Hip-Hop, Talib Kweli has spent his 20-year music career making poignant statements about self-reflection and soul searching. The Brooklyn stalwart brings food for thought to listeners who are emotionally lost or mentally starved, looking towards Kweli’s wisdom to bring them hope.

Just review his some of past gut-checking hits and fan-favorites: his role as one-half of BlackStar with Mos Def in their songs “K.O.S. (Determination)”  and “Respiration” featuring Common in 1998; Reflection Eternal’s ethereal sound in “The Blast” in 2000; his mammoth breakthrough solo single “Get By” in 2003; the Beatles’s “Eleanor Rigby”-sampled “Lonely People” and the tear-jerking “I Try” featuring Mary J. Blige in 2004; and the Kendrick Lamar and Curren$y-assisted “Push Thru” with Kweli in 2012. To revamp his stock in this fashion, Kweli has tapped Maybach Music Group honcho Rick Ross to bring joy to lonely souls to end their fight against depression and lack of motivation in their collaboration track “Heads Up Eyes On.”

Talib Kweli Releases A Song To Inspire Those With Their Heads Up & Eyes Open (Audio)

The visual for the self-explanatory titled song shows a young black male who refuses to leave his roommate’s couch in an apartment located in a palm tree California setting. R&B singer Yummy Bingham sings a heartfelt chorus in between both Kweli’s and the Miami’s Bossman’s verses. The young man spends most of his day inside with black curtains over the windows to block the sunlight, drinking alcohol and smoking weed with friends, exhibiting his external happiness with friends who visit him yet subliminally displaying his internally sullen mind-state.

Kweli sets the song off with an important message, “Just because you are a character don’t mean you have character.” Rick Ross plays clean-up on the track to expound on that rhetoric:

“Top ten n*ggas blossomed in the basement/All the nights we were lacking those refreshments/Rained down under storms with the flows/Articulate with a bounce now I’m back like I’m Derrick Rose.”

It’s an insightful allegory to remain proactive if you want to create change, and to never let complacency overtake your ambitions.