REVIEW

Three Doses of Reality a Day for President Barack Obama – from the Nigga Nas

“Chain gleaming/ Switching lanes/ Two-seating/ Hate him or love him/ For the same reason/ Can't leave it/ The games needs him/ Plus the people need someone to believe in/ So in God's Son we trust/ 'Cause they know I'm gonna give 'em what they want/ They looking for . . . a heroI guess that makes me . . . a hero” – Hero, Nas featuring Kelly Hilson)

When Nasir Jones (born September 14th, 1973) went into the studio to record his album last year he didn’t envisage it ending up being the bone of contention in America with lawyers seeing the Billboard crashing, politicians failing to stop the war in Afghanistan suddenly coming out to stop him. More especially since America was supposed to be focused on the impending presidential elections instead of a side-show like the release of a hip-hop album. I mean for all you know many people released their albums last year and didn’t even cause a stir like they way Jones had Newsweek magazine noticing his.

However it’s Nas we talking about and probably every album since the famed Illmatic (where he insinuated as a 14-year-old, kidnapping the First Lady without an escape plan) have been on the scope of the censors in American urban culture. So, when Nas announced that he was going to title his next album Nigger the sideshow became the main event. Finally Osama was in America and Anthrax in The Staples Centre on NBA Western Tour Finals.

Every commentator from veterans of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), theologians, journalists, academics to retired racist with their confederate flags started becoming experts on race and relations. Once again hackneyed ‘nigger’ became part of national discourse. What did ‘nigger’ mean the last time Wikipedia tried to play fancy? Nas was not going to tell but only wanted his Nigger album to tell it all. But okay, finally the censors won and we ended up with an untitled album. It’s like giving birth to your own child and being denied the right to name him/her.

Untitled is good, actually it’s brilliant, it gives us vintage Nas, the Nas we lost when he started doing jams with En Vogue, Mariah Carey and Genuwine. The Nas who tried to make Braveheart a conscious bunch but ended up with a mob of niggas whose only obsession was sex and the good life. Those were your Fifty-Deep crew whose hobby was dropping verses on mixtapes.

On Untitled, which Nas is quick to announce that he never changed nothing with the name and that unlike Billy Joel and others it’s his soul speaking, he sounds more raw, more in-your-face, more like Tupac at his prime and later on The Don Killuminati; Seven Day Theory. He’s actually a crossover between Immortal Technique and Tupac. Exploring his battles with the powers that be to be allowed to speak, he says in Hero, “But people remember this/ If Nas can't say it, think about these talented kids/ With new ideas being told what they can and can't spit/ I can't sit and watch it/ So, shit, I'ma drop it/ Like it or not/ You ain't gotta cop it”

Add to that a song called America where he bemoans the treatment of minorities in ‘the land of the free’ and raps about coming from the land of the thieves. I was intrigued by his lyrics in Testify when Barack Obama (the whole fucking president of the US had to withdraw a legitimate comment he made about the treatment of minorities by his police officers in racial profiling cases) is forced to drink beer with a racist cop inorder not to lose white voters in three years time. Nas says in Testify, ‘I just burned my American flag/ and sent three crack ??? Nazis to hell and I’m sad/ I’m loading tefs to my mac’/ send these redneck bigots to death and I’m back/ choke him up with his confederate flag/ I know these devils are mad’. That’s one such song that would have given a justification to why the album had to come with its original name and why Obama had to throw his middle-finger to the racists who ill-treated his professor friend.

We make the world go Round is a jam where he is featuring The Game (and not Lil Wayne) and Chris Brown (before he became a boxer) and he fantasizes of booking the whole Trumps Hotel for his ghetto ‘hood. “get the whole Trump Tower top floor for the hood’ he raps before The Game takes over and tells us about how he went from robbing armoured cars to armoured stars and throwing red dice.

Breathe is where he screams, ‘in America you’ll never be free/ middle finger’s up fuck the police/ can a nigga be free’. That’s the thought that crossed Obama’s mind as he sipped the hops to whitewash the race agenda in America.

The album contains tracks like Queens Get Their Money, Sly Fox, NIGGER, Louis Farrakhan, You Can’t stop us Now, Nigger Hatred, Be a Nigger too, Fried Chicken, Project Roach, Ya’ll my Niggas and We’re not Alone.

For all my broke recession-hit kaffirs, this is not an album to burn on an empty CDs but to go out and buy, it will be worth your trouble since I doubt that Nas will ever be this deep. That’s how with his wife having divorced him and bills piling up in maintenance fees, we might get a Nas who sounds like a scorned EMINEM.

Whatever they call it I call it the Nigger album and it rocks.