Yasiin Bey, The Former Mos Def, Poetry-Slams The Barclays Center, Hopes For Jay-Z Summit

The day that Barclays Center opened, late last September, Yasiin Bey (the former Mos Def) was in his adopted home of New Orleans, fielding a stream of calls. “People were asking, ‘Are you gonna be there, are you gonna be there?’” he recalls. Bey did not share his associates’ excitement; a fifth-generation Brooklynite, he’d long felt uneasy about the stadium’s arrival in its highly congested, deeply rooted neighborhood. “I’d told Marty Markowitz, ‘Why not put it [in South Brooklyn]?’” Bey says. “Nope. They wanted it right there on the poppin’ boulevard. But it was already poppin’ there!” That night, feeling “heavy,” Bey sat down to write about the arena, “with my hands, on paper,” expressing his thoughts in a poem. He called it “On center.stadium.status.”