NAS “THE REVOLUTIONARY” IS BACK ON THE STREETS

2008 marks 17 years since Nasir Jones made his recorded debut on Main Source’s Breaking Atoms. At 34, the Queensbridge-bred MC is now wiser, older and a respected industry veteran. So why, you might ask, would he name his upcoming album Nigger– a highly charged term that is powerful enough to get even Oprah Winfrey and Al Sharpton marching in Washington if it is ever mentioned?

People have called Nas many things – a poet, a contradiction, a legend, a traitor – but if there’s one thing that fully epitomizes his character, it is his penchant for telling the truth. That quality right there makes millions of hip hop fans across the world sit up whenever he opens his mouth.

Below is an extract of an interview from the upcoming cover story of XXL magazine. Nas talks politics, the music business and whether he’ll be negatively affected by Jay-Z’s departure from Def Jam.

Are you satisfied with the relationship you have with your record label right now?
Yeah, it’s my last record with them.

Have you thought about what your next move is gonna be?
I have. But it’s too early to talk about.

Does the fact that people never seemed to be able to get over your old beef with Jay affect your thinking?
[Long pause] I think that the history was made with that move, and now I’m just exploring different things, just thinking about what I wanna do next. It’s the illest part of my life, again. I’ve always run into great times. This shit gotta be fun for you. Whatever Nas situation will be great for Nas, and that’s what I’m trying to figure out. It’s not about nothing that happened in the past. It’s about moving ahead, finding new ground and going to the next phase.

Rap fans looked at your situation at Def Jam, and they saw your albums getting pushed back twice in a row and Jay coming right before you twice in a row, and they always assumed there was something more going on there.
People gotta give me more credit than that. That’s not fair, if I push my shit back, to blame it on somebody. This is me you’re talking about. This is not somebody that just signed yesterday. This is somebody that’s been in the game a long time, put out a lot of albums. I know what I’m doing. So when I push my shit back, deal with it. I think a lot of people get caught up in rumors. It’s not fair to Jay, either, the way it’s put on him. But he gotta handle that. You wanna be president of the record label—he gotta handle that. He gotta handle the pressure. He gotta handle the negative talk.

I never needed it. I could pocket my marketing money. I market myself. Sold records on my last album on the strength of my own movement. My record this time will move or not move on the strength of my own movement. I’m not doing a Budweiser commercial. No diss to Jay and them niggas. Whatever. Do what you do. I’m not doing a Budweiser commercial. I don’t want to. If rappers wanna do Budweiser commercials, if they wanna sell the records Jay selling, they need to put the time in that people like Jay put in. I put in Nas time, and I get Nas results. If I got any more, I would feel funny. Everything that happened for me was planned—by me. So people should just realize these are my ideas. This is what I’m doing.

You say you’re satisfied with the situation at your label. It’s no exaggeration to say that puts you in a minority among Def Jam artists.
I don’t know. I can’t find too many people that’s happy anywhere in the state of the business right now.

Yeah, but at Def Jam in particular—
At Sony in particular. Shit is fucked up over there.

But longtime Def Jam artists have been complaining about the way things are run there.
I see where Ghostface shit definitely supposed to have been bigger. It’s just…things are the way they are for whatever reason. I can’t sit here and tell you Ghost’s situation. I don’t personally know it. I just know I would love to see his shit everywhere. But at the same time, Ghost reaching who Ghost supposed to reach. Nas reaching who Nas supposed to reach. Jay reaching who Jay supposed to reach. It’s not gonna be easy for nobody out here.

Ghost came out and did 35,000 the first week. You’re not going to be happy with that.
The marketplace is bad right now. If you want to do big, real business, you’ll wait ’til the market gets better. That’s not my mission right now… Since I said “hip-hop is dead,” I think a lot of niggas is starting to take this shit serious. It ain’t about sales no more. When Kanye killed 50, it was to show you this shit is about something real now. No diss to no rappers I’m talking about right now, but it ain’t about just selling no more. I said hip-hop is dead, and if that helped, then I’m a bad muthafucka. You can’t take that from me. And I feel like this record is the next chapter, going into something bigger. It’s a recession… People are going back to being humble again. Because everybody is not gonna get a big multimillion-dollar advance.

So the downtimes for the record industry are gonna help hip-hop?
Yeah, thank God. People do what they do. I ain’t knocking nobody. But I know one thing: This recession that’s going on—everywhere, not just hip-hop—is gonna produce better artists.

Hip-hop was very much under the microscope last year, beginning with the Don Imus situation. What’s curious about that is that, here we are, nearly a year later, Imus has his job back, and somehow hip-hop continues to be examined because of what he said.
I think Imus was just trying to be cool, trying to be down. And it was a win-win situation for him, because it wasn’t handled properly. I believe in Don Imus’ freedom of speech. Because if we don’t know what people are thinking, how can we solve any problems? If you don’t know what Nas is thinking, how do you know what the people that listen to me are thinking? People tell their kids, “Don’t listen to that.” But you can find out who your kids really are if you listen to what they’re listening to and watch what they’re watching.

Do you think people like Cosby, Oprah, Sharpton or Bill O’Reilly have ever actually listened to a Nas album all the way through?
Hell no!

Can you imagine that?
I don’t wanna imagine that. My shit ain’t for them.