All Rights Reserved. Powered by WordPress. Music The song is a pure surprise. When through that hellscape of love lost and police, of drugs and constant obstacles, we are presented with the innate temerity of humanity. When he is fully engaged in the back-breaking work of breathing life into people we do not wish to know, it is then that Nas is at his finest.
The next thing that screams out at you is that Nas is behaving as though he has run out of things to say and feel. A call most of us never heed. The best albums are sometimes hard to listen to. Complex and revealing, you can feel like an invisible Bilbo Baggins under the thrum of Smaug. But Nasir is not such an album. It is a great rapper stretching before a workout and it is Nas at his most irrelevant over some of the prettiest beats of his career.
He reverts to preacher Nas here and he is not a proselytizer. He is a watcher, silent and looking; recording. And there are many happenings in this great big world for Nasir Jones to talk about. We get nary a mention of the flame he doused, his infidelity and alcoholism spilling ink all over their relationship.
We get nothing of the catharsis of Because, yes, Nas is an asshole. This is something we all must come to accept. He is a valiant, Pan-Africanist so he says , top five dead-or-alive asshole. Because, as a man, you come to understand that you are who you love and who you destroy. At least, anyway, you come to think about it. To wrestle with it.
Nas does no such wrestling on Nasir. So Nas may love ideas about Black kings and queens, of Kush and Kemet, but he is also a signature example of what happens when that idea runs amok. When we are soaked in the shambles of respectability, of act-right, and, suddenly, his and our weaknesses appear. Because you cannot be a king without a queen in that world, and you do not treat a queen the way Nas treated Kelis.
