Nas: I still chuckle whenever I hear Nasir Jones’ roundhouse swings on Jay-Z with “Ether” that had Beyonce’s boo leaning on the ropes with liquid legs. But Nas made a very noisy shuttle launch through the atmosphere when he ignited Illmatic on an unsuspecting public, one of those Thriller-type joints that can neither be duplicated nor imitated but only placed behind protective glass in the Hall of Fame of classic albums. With all the tools and equipment at his disposal to achieve commercial success, Nas seems to recoil from frivolous fame as if it’s a coiled cobra and remains true to the game with Hip Hop is Dead, replete with an ominous hearse to decry the subterranean levels that he believes his beloved genre has sunken to. Only he would be would have the testicular fortitude to come out with an album titled Nigger. After spitting a few verbal darts and nails at Rev. Jesse Jackson, Fox and the NAACP for their objection to the title, Nas explained his decision to try to disempower the N-word this way:
“I wanna make the word easy on mutha—-as’ ears,” he explained. “You see how white boys ain’t mad at ‘cracker’ ’cause it don’t have the same [sting] as ‘nigger’? I want ‘nigger’ to have less meaning [than] ‘cracker.’ With all the bullsh– that’s going on in the world, racism is at its peak. I wanna do the sh– that’s not being done. I wanna be the artist who ain’t out. I wanna make the music I wanna hear.”
