I Will Not Fall for the Okey-Doke

So the best rapper alive (no, not that fool) has a hot new album out.  Critical response has been predictably tepid, focusing on the alleged lameness of the beats and the emcee's supposed self-contradictions.  I'm not having it.  You can say what you want about Nasir Jones's determination to choose backing tracks that do not unduly distract from his rhyming—I can't front, I've joined that chorus on occasion and still would love to see Nas respond to some truly forward-thinking production—but to fixate on that is to miss the point.  I buy my ticket because the man is the nicest on the mic.

Hip-hop is, and always has been, about more than just the voice of the emcee, but it would take a fool not to recognize the pendulum has swung a long way from the days when deejays like Eric B. and Jazzy Jeff got top billing over rappers, even legendary ones.  There's a reason for that, too.  Beats may speak louder than words from time to time, but humans conceive, articulate, and process thoughts through language.  The voice of the poet will always slice through the even the most compelling wall of funky sound, even more so when it's speaking truth.  Give me superlative vocal ID, sound concepts, diverse vocabulary, credent similes and metaphors, verbal dexterity, flow, attitude, brains, and a sense of adventure, and I will take it, no matter what beat the lyrics are spit over.  Nas has all of this in spades, so it doesn't bother me that his new Untitled is probably his most anodyne set of beats yet.  If anything, that just brings focus and coherence.  Compared to Hip Hop Is Dead, which felt overstuffed with manufactured choruses and unproductive guest shots, Untitled is a model of economy.  Nas is the rare hip-hop artist that bows, at least somewhat, to the convention of rock-era album structure.  Illmatic was just nine songs, and even if his subsequent joints have been a little longer, he's never been a big fan of skits, remixes, or posse cuts.  You can call that selfish, but the man knows what he does well.  Bravehearts aside, he's always seemed like the type of fellow who wouldn't want to join any club that would have him as a member.

But complaints about boring-ass loops have been secondary to questions about the emcee's motives.  Many of you probably know that Nas originally intended to call the record Nigger.  Eventually he was persuaded otherwise, as he recounts on the cranky, defensive lead single "Hero."  (Props to Nasir for suggesting he has a peer-level relationship with Billy Joel.)  I don't want to wade unnecessarily into a minefield here, but I don't think Nas was trying to explore any area with the original title that others haven't surveyed before in various contexts.  A couple years ago Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy wrote a book with the same title, which caused a micro-furor but was largely reviewed respectfully.  And nobody freaked out when A Tribe Called Quest released this song, even though it basically just posed a question and then shrugged at the possible implications.

I am sure Nas was happy the title attracted media attention; the guy is a capitalist, and he did call his previous album Hip Hop Is Dead, which didn't exactly discourage press coverage.  It's fair to suggest he's flirting with getting a rep as a content-free provocateur and in the process obscuring his undeniable mic skills.  But critics need to see the other side, too.  You can't listen to Untitled without admitting that, in his own episodic way, Nas is trying to confront something serious here.  I'll leave it up to someone else to decide whether his ambitions are serious enough to justify using America's most famous racial slur as a title.  But it seems to me like many people have used the title controversy as an excuse not to engage with the album's content.

I can tell you what I take from Untitled, and it provides a definitive answer, at least for me, to charges that Nas is cynically exploiting racial issues.  Some people see hypocrisy in the fact that Nas doesn't maintain a consistent personality—let alone a continuous, sustained take on Race in America—throughout the record.  I'm happy to concede the multiplicity of perspectives.  Sometimes he plays the revolutionary, sometimes the thug; he talks about how much he loves weed, champagne, diamonds, and pussy, then he calls out his Caucasian fans for mistaking their enjoyment of black music for a meaningful understanding of black culture.  He rails against stereotypes when they're used as weapons; he chuckles to himself as he admits he embraces the power they can offer.  After castigating mass media for its unexamined institutional racism, he concedes he relies on that same media to distribute his message.

What I can't concede is that these multiplicities undermine the power of the record.  They are the power of the record.  It's like that old Gandhi quote: "It is not my aim to be consistent with what I have said, but to be consistent with the truth as it reveals itself to me."  It seems to me Nas's ultimate goal is to show (not tell) exactly why racial slurs and stereotypes should be unacceptable to thinking people: they reduce rich individual complexities to demeaning generalities.  In reality, each of us contains multitudes of conflicting impulses.  Nas is a militant and a baller, a burnout and a scholar; and so are you.  Untitled is not just about the various facets of Nasir Jones; it's the emcee's take on the glories and flaws of his community and culture, the achievements and the self-sabotage, the defiance and the submission, the shit people do each day to get by.  Fundamentally, it's about the way slurs and stereotypes demean, define, and diminish the people they purport to describe, and how, in return, those people struggle against, embrace, and even find power in those words and concepts.  It's really not such a complicated idea.  If you didn't pick that up, listen again to the erstwhile title track "N.I.*.*.E.R.," with its travelogue and its pep-talk chorus: "We are the slave and the master/What you lookin' for?/You the question and the answer."  Sometimes you're a prisoner of the past; sometimes you're in control of your present and future, but ultimately you are an individual at war with yourself.  Whatever group you belong to.

This is not to say Nas is lyrically above criticism.  As always, he's morose and self-pitying.  He benefited substantially from living in the era of the digital download, because leaked pre-release versions of the album included some tracks that were kinda wack.  Recently the rapper NYOil has been raising a ruckus about Nas being "one of the most overrated emcees ever."  Now, I don't begrudge anybody the right to battle Nas over content,* but I obviously disagree and would point out that it doesn't sound like Oil has listened to too much Nas over the years.  Even so, I think Oil had the better of this argument about "Be a Nigga Too," and I'm glad it didn't make Untitled's final cut.  Sometimes Nas is provacative without thinking things through.  By now you've undoubtedly dimissed me as an apologist, but I think even that can be a blessing: it allows him to be multiple things to multiple people, probe different sides of various issues, question himself and answer those questions and answer those questions again in a different way once his perspective shifts.  Basically he's open to new shit and doesn't live by dogma, and guys like that are always going to reverse field from time to time.  But like they say, foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.  Would you really like it better if he was 100% on a consistent message, like Chuck D on Nation of Millions?  Don't you think that would get a little airless after about three songs?

* I'm going to bite Joe Posnanski and do a long asterisked footnote here.  It irritates me when hip-hop critics review a record without bothering to engage with the emcee(s).  It reminds me of sportswriters who hate sports and the athletes who play them.  I know that it's easier to talk about which old soul songs get looped.  I'm thinking in particular of this review by this individual "Ian Cohen," which, after offering the usual bitches about duff beats, accuses Nas of cynicism—his 2010 record will be called McCain Killa (good one!)—and then proceeds to dismiss the record on the basis of cherry-picked lyrics he has not thought about.  Rest assured that no emcee comes up with winners every time out.  Nas is no exception.  But Cohen reduces each song to a cartoon; he seizes on the fleeting UFO reference on the one-world chillout "We're Not Alone," as if that's what the song's about or renders its actual message mere bong resin.  Worse, he quotes a lyric from the Fox News fuck-you "Sly Fox" ("The Fox has a bushy tail/And Bush tells lies/And Fox trots/So I don't know what's real") and asserts it "essentially means nothing."  Now, I'm not going to claim this is the best rhyme I've ever heard, but it's pretty obvious what Nasir is on about.  Fox News is the propaganda arm of the Republican party; it was founded by the man who helped get the first President Bush elected; its commentators often move to positions in the GOP power structure and vice versa.  Although these connections are sometimes shadowy and hard to document, they're real ("The Fox has a bushy tail"); the network responds to the needs of the GOP ("Bush tells lies/And Fox trots"); and the result is that the truth is consistently obscured ("I don't know what's real").  See, that's not so hard.  All you need to do is read the words and think about them.  Also lost in Cohen's review is the thoroughly ripped third verse of that same tune:

They say I'm all about murder, murder and kill, kill
But what about Grindhouse and Kill Bill?
What about Cheney and Halliburton?
The backdoor deals on oil fields?
How is Nas the most violent person?
Y'all don't know talent if it hit you
Bringin' up my criminal possession charges with a pistol
I use Viacom as my firearm to let the lyrics split you
Who do you rely upon?
To shoot shells at Leviathan
I'm dealin' with the higher form
Fuck if you care how I write a poem
Only fox that I love was the red one
Only black man that Fox love is in jail or a dead one
Redrum, political bedlam
Don't let the hype enter your eyes and eardrum
Murdoch own Fox, not A-Team with Baracus
And he hate Barack 'cause he march with the marchers

So in conclusion and in summary: Take that, yo.  It's not like that's the best verse on the record, either.

Nas is happy to shock you if you're looking to be shocked; that's a great way to separate the wheat from the chaff.  (On "Y'all My Ni**az," he both takes the easy way out and neatly summarizes an important hip-hop First Principle: "If it offends you, it's meant to, it's that simple.")  But he's actually trying to engage a complicated question.  What would you have him do instead?  Lots of critics have unfavorably compared Untitled to Tha Carter III.  I'm not mad at you if you agree; I also dig Lil Wayne.  Dwayne Carter is an outstanding rapper with tremendous vocal ID and force of personality; he's funny and can be substantive too, when he feels like it.  But why are critics (and not just white hipster ones) so much more comfortable listening to Weezy F Baby emote about his promethazine addiction, doing lady cops in the backs of squad cars, and Al Sharpton's similarity to Don King than hearing Esco meticulously dissect present-day reality?  Wait, don't answer that.

Comments

[tris mccall]

most intellectuals will only half-listen.

[JK]

Hey, I know I'm late to this post but it's great. I have a site: Elitish.com and am looking for some more contributors and if you're interested my e-mail is thejk@zenbe.com If not, best of luck with the site.