In the last two decades, much of the nation's high-rise public housing has been demolished and the residents displaced to impoverished city outskirts. By the time he was growing up in New York in the 1980s, the projects were notorious for drugs, violence, and lousy living conditions. The cheap, falling-down high-rise buildings that Mos Def compares to tall social hurdles were mostly built in the 1950s and 1960s. Public housing was supposed to work as a government subsidy for low-income housing.īefore World War II, most projects solidly built low rises. were built in the 1930s as a part of a general push for state-funded social services. Mos Def's seven firmaments or seven heavens are probably the mystical Muslim ones. Of course, all these images emerged from peoples who believed the earth was flat, which made it easy to envision a layered stack of heavens and earths the seven firmaments have sometimes been explained as planets, or even as layers of the atmosphere. The Qu'ran also mentions the existence of seven heavens (or firmaments) and seven earths, the nature of which have been interpreted in many different ways over time. In the Talmud, a set of Jewish scholarly texts informing much of Jewish belief, at least one passage describes "seven heavens," an idea which remains a part of Jewish mysticism. Of course, now we know that the blue up above is not an actual dome, and "firmament" has been reinterpreted in the Christian tradition to refer to heaven, or the heavens. In Genesis 1, the basic creation story for both Judaism and Christianity, God creates "the firmament," which was understood for many centuries to be the dome of sky that covered the earth. It may seem like Mos Def was getting complicated with his five dimensions talk (it's hard for the human brain to imagine a fifth dimension), but he might have actually been keeping it simple. These additional dimensions are hard to conceive of, but they are necessary to explain how the universe works. The fourth dimension is time, which is understood by scientists as a more abstract dimension necessary for accurately interpreting physics in real time.Įver since Einstein's theory of relativity, scientists have gradually accepted the theory of a four-dimensional universe where everything takes place on an abstract four-dimensional grid called "spacetime." Are you with us? It's okay if you're not, because what we're about to say isn't easy on anyone's brain, even the scientists who came up with it: Lately, it seems like we might be dealing with way more than four dimensions, and possibly as many as eleven dimensions. We can tell if something is far away, high up, large, or flat. Can anyone name the four known dimensions? Height, width, and depth are easy-those are the physical dimensions, the x, y and z coordinates that algebra and calculus deal with, and also the dimensions that are obvious to our human senses. It also drops the name of a 1999 film, The Sixth Sense, which made it big in the late-summer box office with a story about a boy who could see dead people (he's the kid who whispers "I see dead people," throwing some into waves of goose bumps and others into convulsions of laughter).īut let's get to the science part, already. We're guessing this line is giving some love to pop R&B group the Fifth Dimension. What do you think? Can human cultures keep up with their own technological advances? Given that we're living in the future, we should be able to address the issue of "future shock" based on experience. Years and years have passed since "Mathematics" was written, and information overload is certainly the word of the day. But he might also have known that the book was re-released in 1999 for something like the seventh time. Mos Def might be getting mildly prophetic here with his talk about "forthcoming live future shock"-in other words, he predicts that Toffler's disaster is on the verge of coming to pass. It was Toffler who first coined the term "information overload," the small-scale version of the big future shock he predicted.
The resulting tension would create a sort of internal culture shock, a state of technological emergency.
Alvin Toffler's 1970 book Future Shock predicted an oncoming flood of technological changes so overwhelming that human beings would not be able to keep up with it. For starters, "fourth comin'" is a clever play on the homophones "fourth" and "forth." Homophones are words that are pronounced the same but have different meanings.īut Mos Def is playing with even bigger ideas than homophones here.
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