REVIEW

"Jah Told Me - In His Own Words"

Often when I have to make posts about musicians I just feel tempted to explain before I pummel you with rhetoric you might not agree with. And today I am going to do the same because I am about to write a short one about Nasir Jones - okay he's Nas to all you people who consume rap at a customer level.

This Queensbridge native has been my favourite rapper for donkey years because I can say without fear of contradiction that he's the only rapper with both the underground and the mainstream firmly in his grip. He might not be as deep as Krumbsnatcher or Immortal Technique but on any given day he tackles the same issues - though with diplomacy rather than uncooked anger often heard on most of the rappers on DJ Premier's mixtapes.

Now, after years of being a fan and collecting Nas albums, the only one I don't have is the first one when he was 14-years old and rapping about kidnapping Ronald Reagan's wife without an escape plan, aptly titled Illmatic. The rest I have made sure I collect and listen to every word and memorise the ones my brain has developed a capacity to archive.

So, recently I have been into those American rappers who seem to revive the genre after its surrogate father Tupac Shakur died that Spring evening. And while I am currently still struggling to formulate an opinion on Drake and Lil Wayne I have been at pains to admit that for the first time in many years Nas made me relook at my continent and country with another glance. Especially in South Africa where we know we are being led by a lunatic president and his entourage of greedy officials who will stop at nothing to milk the cow for the remaining three - or probably eight years.

So, on the album Nas did with Damien Marley, okay you know he's the son of the legendary Bob Marley I came across a line that shook me. Well, for your information I'm not an easy man to shock - I'm a journalist and what you see on the newsp

aper and gets shocked of is actually a diluted version of what I saw. But Nas had me thinking; In a song titled In His Own Word from their collabo titled Distant Relatives Nas raps, "why are South Afrikans dying from circumcision/ they lack proper surgeons suffer malnutrition/ underestimate the wealth of their own wisdom/ it's like it's been exchanged for this penicillin". Worrying; the same song features Steve Marley.

What worried me was not that Nas said that. I live in this country and have read A Man who is not a Man, a book that profiles what goes wrong in those circumcision schools and how do we end up with 'men' without penises. I was not worried by Nas touching on his 'motherland' cuz he did touch on its from his It Was Written album. He's the first rapper to openly rap, from an informed position about Mandela, Shell gas company and other forms of African civilization.

I was angry because he was right. We have underestimated the wealth of our own wisdom. But well, while he generalises I understand that he has no geographical and anthropological understanding of this country. The only people dying from botched circumcision are found in the Eastern Cape. Not all of the Eastern Cape but on the Transkei side of it. My tribe, Mapulana have been circumcising and initiating for centuries and still have to report their first casualty of a botched circumcision. Circumcision does not kill people; amateurs do.

For the life of me I am circumcised (though by a surgeon) and I am still alive and almost all my friends were circumcised in the bush and are fine. And for Nas, we don't lack proper surgeons but altruistic bush surgeons in the Transkei. We don't suffer malnutrition but dehydration because of global warming as opposed to how it was always done before this phenomena became our plague.

Have we exchanged our wisdom for penicillin? Yes, because all those failed amakhwetha end up in the hospital - on antibiotics while there are herbs to accelerate their healing in the bush. So, Nas got me thinking as he should make the stupid culture vultures in the Eastern Cape to do the same. After all all Mapulana and amaXhosa are distant relatives - as Nas and Damian rightfully said.

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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.