Born Again-Danger Mouse & Jemini the gifted one

by Fred Frio

Twenty years in the dark. A career derailed by handcuffs. A sequel that shouldn’t exist — and somehow exceeds the original.

Danger Mouse & Jemini the Gifted One  ·  Lex Records, 2023

Born Again

DANGER MOUSE & JEMINI THE GIFTED ONE

Here’s the premise: a Brooklyn rapper and a then-unknown beatmaker cut a follow-up album in 2004, riding the goodwill of their critically beloved debut. Then a narcotics arrest, a prison sentence, a label dispute, two decades of silence — and a record that nobody expected to hear finally surfaces in August 2023, a fossil that arrived alive.

That debut was Ghetto Pop Life. If you slept on it, the short version is this: it landed in 2003 as one of the year’s most engrossing hip-hop records, earning Danger Mouse and Jemini a spot on The Guardian’s list of the forty best bands in America. Then Danger Mouse went nuclear — The Grey Album, Gorillaz, Gnarls Barkley, Broken Bells — while Jemini disappeared entirely. The what-could-have-been hung in the air for two decades like a question nobody could answer.

Born Again is that question answered. And the answer is better than anyone had any right to hope for.

The backstory matters here. These ten tracks were recorded immediately after Ghetto Pop Life, then shelved when Jemini was incarcerated on narcotics charges. The album sat in limbo partly because Danger Mouse submitted it to Lex Records without Jemini’s approval while Jemini was locked up — triggering ownership disputes and compensation arguments that kept it buried until 2023. You can hear the shadow of all of that in the music. Jemini himself noted you can catch a reticence, a creeping sense of regret threading through the lyrics, the feeling of a man who could already see the walls closing in.

What Danger Mouse does on this record is a kaleidoscopic version of what Kanye was doing concurrently — baroque pop and prog-rock flourishes chopped into opulent bangers, fuzzy psychedelic guitars sitting next to cinematic soul chops, a funhouse mirror held up to mid-aughts hip-hop production. The beats are dustier than his later work, less polished than the star-producer he’d become. That’s a feature, not a bug. This sounds like a man at the peak of his hunger, before success smoothed the edges.

Jemini, meanwhile, sounds like he’s operating with something to prove — which, given the circumstances, he absolutely was. The man vacillates between gruff, introspective verses and Mos Def-style singing so naturally you’ll double-check the liner notes looking for featured artists. There aren’t any. This is all him, all ten tracks, no guests. That would be a liability for most rappers. Here it’s a testament.

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Track by track

01. All I —- standout

02. Locked Up — peak

03. Me— standout

04. Knuckle Sandwich II—– standout

05.Born Again—-standout

06.Brooklyn Bazquiat ——mixed

07. Walk the Walk—-peak

08. Dear Poppa—-peak

09. Where You From—-skip

10. World Music—-standout

Opener “All I” is a contemplative throat-clear — a guitar loop and solemn harmonies and Jemini mapping out the hustles and survival that preceded his music career. It sets a tone that’s more introspective than Ghetto Pop Life‘s scrappier, more braggadocious energy, and it works. “Knuckle Sandwich II” is more aggressive than its predecessor, which given what was happening in Jemini’s life when it was recorded feels entirely appropriate. “Walk the Walk” is the album’s biggest highlight — some of Jemini’s hungriest bars over a wild, sprawling beat anchored by a gospel-inspired chorus that shouldn’t work and absolutely does.

“Locked Up” and “Dear Poppa” are where the album earns its emotional weight. These are the rawest, most unguarded moments on the record — the places where the context bleeds through the music and the whole tragedy of the thing becomes audible. Closer “World Music” goes somewhere genuinely unexpected, Jemini rapping and singing over a beat that sounds like it wandered in from a Kid Cudi and Ratatat session circa 2009, and somehow it’s a perfect ending.

The one stumble is “Brooklyn Bazquiat,” the lead single — a warped flute sample over a track that has its vibe interrupted by an interpolation of Biggie’s “Hypnotize” that lands somewhere between charming and clumsy. And “Where You From” has a hook that feels airlifted from a passable DMX B-side. Two wobbles on ten tracks. You’ll survive.

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The album wears its age honestly. Some moments will sound immediately dated to certain ears — and that’s fine, because Born Again is a genuine time capsule, not a retrofitted nostalgia play. It was made in 2004 by two people who had no idea whether anyone would ever hear it. That authenticity is exactly what gives it a timeless quality that a deliberately throwback record could never manufacture.

There is no modern equivalent of this album because this album is not modern. It is 2004 preserved in amber, and it sounds extraordinary.

The record arrived almost exactly twenty years after it was made, on the same label that shelved it. It has no featured artists, no executive producer sheen, no rollout strategy designed to make a long-gone rapper sound contemporary. It simply is what it was — a very good hip-hop album that got swallowed by circumstance and finally clawed its way out.

A note

Thomas Smith — Jemini the Gifted One — died on March 27, 2025, following complications from diabetes. He was from Brooklyn. He made two albums, both of them worth your time. Go listen to them both.

The verdict

Not a comeback. Not a nostalgia act. A genuinely great hip-hop record that the world wasn’t allowed to have for twenty years. You have it now. Don’t sleep on it again.