Nas (Def Jam)
Nas dutifully hyped his ninth album during the height of summer, because that's what you do when Lil' Wayne is everywhere: You make sure the season's hot-shit rapper has a little competition. But the untitled disc is really a back-to-school piece. This is Nas as essayist -- and although the rhetoric is thoroughly familiar, his grip on it is firmer than ever. Even when he's rapping about aliens, it's tough to simply laugh it off as a conspiratorial rant: "I'm-a tell you what I seen with my three eyes/Word to me, not a hoax, back in 9-9/A spacecraft in the skyline/In L.A., in daytime," he says during "We're Not Alone" -- but the song's broader emphasis is on free thought, not spooky stuff.
Elsewhere, Nas seems freshly comfortable with the act of balancing multiple personas, perhaps because only three of them are prominent, and they feed off each other, anyway: the agitated Queensbridge kid, the autodidactic pseudo-intellectual, and the political shitstormer. (Largely absent: the sex fiend; the hip-hop grump; the high priest; the conspicuous consumer; the dutiful husband.) When the thug and the nerd combine, the lyrics are sharpest: "The lord is a G, he gotta be/Who's the God of suckers and snitches?/The economy" (from "America"). But the nerd, on his own, can be equally funny: "You aint as hot as I is/All of these fake prophets are not messiahs/You don't know how high the sky is/The square milage of Earth, or what pi is" (from "Queens Get The Money").
The exploits of the shitstormer, meanwhile, often can be tidily summarized: "Sly Fox"? Fuck Fox News. "Testify"? Prove your worth, white fans. "Black President"? Obama gets a free pass for now. "N.I.G.G.E.R."? "Y'all My Niggas"? I was going to call the album Nigger, but they wouldn't let me. (A sub-personality of the shitstormer -- the extended metaphorist -- turns "Fried Chicken" into women and "Project Roach" into people.) Somehow, though, none of it feels like bluster for bluster's sake -- and Nas is certainly capable of that.
And all of this means that he's generally sought out beats that wouldn't upstage the lectures. I'm partial to those with soulful minimalism (Salaam Remi's "You Can't Stop Us Now," Mark Batson's "Testify"), and I think stic.man from Dead Prez probably will be under-appreciated for the restraint he shows on "Untitled" and "We're Not Alone." (He does the Black Rock Coalition thing on "Sly Fox," though.) Definite throwaways: the splashy, Game-flavored popcraft underneath "Make The World Go Round" and DJ Troomp's thin, string-filled groove for the otherwise evocative "N.I.G.G.E.R." But, yeah, the music is all secondary, anyway, like the band at a political convention or the cuts that buffer NPR reports.
Previously: Glen Campbell | Takka Takka | Taylor Swift | Dwele | The Fairline Parkway | Nortec Collective | Pink Skull | The Last Shadow Puppets | Kail | Grupo Fantasma | Mannequin Men | Nicolay & Kay | Times New Viking | Lyrics Born | Shelby Lynne | The Stance Brothers | Kokayi | The Sword | Fuck Buttons | Cadence Weapon | Paul Oakenfold
Comments