w/Common, Gang Starr Wed March 12, Showbox, $35, doors at 8 pm.

A literary critic once advised his readers "never to trust what writers say about their own writings"; the same can be said about rappers: Never trust what rappers say about their own rapping. The level of trust, however, may vary from rapper to rapper. That is to say, some rappers should almost be trusted and others shouldn't be trusted at all. New York-born and -based rapper Talib Kweli is a member of the latter; you should never trust him for one minute. He will never tell you the truth of his art, and all judgment of who he is and what his music does should depend entirely on what he actually produces--his rhymes.

But who is Talib Kweli? After years of banishment, Kweli and his partners Mos Def and DJ Hi-Tek were responsible for returning the Native Tongues spirit to the center of hiphop. Kweli was something of a philosophical Phife Dawg, Def a revolutionary Q-Tip; and though Def's and Kweli's social criticism was often much harsher than anything recorded by the Native Tongues tribe, overall their music had the same warmth, care, and humanity that hummed through CDs like Done by the Forces of Nature, Buhloone Mind State, and Nature of a Sista.

After two or so years of making guest appearances on hiphop and triphop tracks, in 1998 Kweli and Def impressively rewarded an inordinate amount of anticipation with their debut CD, Mos Def and Talib Kweli Are Black Star. Who can forget the day it hit the streets? It was all everybody talked about for weeks and weeks; word had it that the CD would take everything to the next (if not final) level--and it actually did, with the crowning effort, "Respiration," instantly entering the eternity that rap journalists universally describe as "a hiphop classic."

Kweli then went on to release an important CD with DJ Hi-Tek called Reflection Eternal (2000), which pushed the rap form past the border of poetry (as in KRS-One's "Poetry") into the domain of philosophy (as in KRS-One's "My Philosophy"). His new CD, Quality, is not, in terms of music, as arty as Reflection Eternal, which was produced by the brainy Hi-Tek, but is in many ways better and certainly sunnier (Quality was produced by pop beatmakers like DJ Quik and Kayne West, who has worked less successfully with the horribly overrated Jay-Z). But despite its joyous mood and more radio-friendly sound, Kweli's raps on Quality are still dense and philosophical. Which brings me to the matter I raised in the opening sentence of this preview: You should never trust what a rapper has to say about his rapping.

When I recently asked Kweli over the phone if he "considered himself a philosophical rapper," he said, "I'm not [philosophical].... If someone wants to call me that, in their assessment of me, or if that's what they want to say after I die, that's fine. But I'm not gonna walk around sayin' I'm a philosopher. That's corny."

"Why is it corny?" I asked the most philosophical rapper of our day.

"Because it's self-serving. 'You're a philosopher'--what does that mean, that you philosophize? And that's corny. That has no relevance to what people really need to do in their lives. If someone calls you that, that's fine, but for you to refer to yourself as that is very arrogant."

I argued, "But your second CD is called Reflection Eternal, which is a very philosophical title, if ever there was one. And it seems to me that in your raps you are constantly thinking about social situations, and reflecting, very deeply, on those social situations."

And he countered, "I like to hold a mirror up to society and show society itself through my words. That's why the name of the CD was Reflection Eternal.... But I'm of the people, and once you start saying stuff like 'I'm the teacher' or 'I'm the philosopher,' you separate yourself from the people. I try not to preach or judge or philosophize on records. I try just to paint the picture. And the way I paint the picture is to paint in a truthful way, so that you can take away what you take away from it."

As always: Not the artist but his/her art is the only truth there is.