Nas' New Joint

[Soulstation1]

man i just picked up this cd @ bestbuy

i can't stop listening to the jam "these are our heroes"

in which he rips up kobe

i heard this song about 6x's in a row

the price of the cd is worth it, just for this song

ss1

[Brandon Burke]

The last three Nas LPs (Stillmatic, God's Son, and this one) were all supposed to be "the one where he takes it back." But we keep sayin this and it never really happens. Believe me, no one wants this record to be good more than me. When Mr. Jones it at the top of his game he's one of the all-time greats. Period. He's just so inconsistent, that's all. You never know what you're gonna get from record to record...which is to say nothing for song to song!

I'll probably buy this on iTunes when I get home. I don't care about CD artwork. I just want it on headphones. If it turns out I like it enough, I'll buy it on wax.

I'm also going to make a HipHopSite.com purchase as well. The new EDO. G & Pete Rock LP as well as some weird 2xCD set of Pete Rock mixing his favorite funk, soul, and jazz tracks. I dunno what that last one is but it's sure to go OOP sooner than later. I'm getting while I have the chance. B-)

Edited November 30, 2004 by Brandon Burke

[Brandon Burke]

Recognize the loop on "Nazareth Savage" yet? The female vocal "ooohs" and "aaahs"?

Hint: Also used on the Beastie Boys' "Professor Booty", only they just clipped the opening drum break.

[Soulstation1]

i like the songs with ludacris and the one with maxwell

ludacris has a new cd comin' out, he cracks me up BIG time

ss1

[Soulstation1]

is nas ripping tiger, cuba gooding jr and diggs for marrying white girlzz?

he doesn't come out and say it directly

ss1

[maren]

Up, to add this story from Sunday's New York Times:

Hip-Hop Family Values

By ALEX ABRAMOVICH

Published: December 5, 2004

NASIR JONES, the 31-year-old rapper who is better known as Nasty Nas, Nas Escobar, Nastradamus or, more simply, Nas, released his first album, "Illmatic," in 1994. A densely textured, deeply lyrical portrait of life in Long Island City's Queensbridge projects, the record signaled the resurgence of the moribund New York hip-hop scene and helped pave the way for Biggie Smalls, Jay-Z and a new generation of New York rappers. The music press called it a hip-hop masterpiece; The Village Voice called Nas "one of the most important writers of the 20th century."

Its no surprise, then, that the appearance of Nas's eighth, and most ambitious, studio album - the two-CD "Street's Disciple," which was released Tuesday - has occasioned cover stories in leading hip-hop magazines. More surprising is the amount of space magazines like The Source and The Ave have devoted to a figure who doesn't fit the archetypal hip-hop narrative: the rapper's father. But if Nas is no ordinary M.C., his father, the Harlem-based singer, cornetist and bandleader Olu Dara, is no run-of-the mill dad.

Mr. Dara was born Charles Jones III, in Natchez, Miss., in 1941. His father and grandfather were singers, and his great-uncles performed alongside Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith in the Rabbit Foot Minstrel troupe. Mr. Dara began his professional career at the age of 7 and went on to play with the jazz stars Art Blakey, Henry Threadgill and Cassandra Wilson, to collaborate with the writers Rita Dove and August Wilson, to lead his Okra Orchestra and Natchezsippi Dance Band, and to record two critically acclaimed solo albums. He met Nas's mother, Ann Jones, in Brooklyn, in 1964, and married her the next year. (The couple divorced in 1985; Mrs. Jones died of breast cancer in 2002.) Today, Nas is engaged to the singer Kelis, whose own father, the saxophone player and preacher Kenneth Rogers, played with Mr. Dara many times over the years.

Mr. Dara, who played the trumpet on Nas's debut, sings and plays on 2 of "Street's Disciples" 25 tracks, and the sepia-toned video for its lead single, the bluesy "Bridging the Gap, " features father and son performing in front of a billboard-size panorama of family photographs. "Bridging the gap from the blues to jazz to rap," Nas explains in the song's first verse, "the history of music on this track." Nas's record company, Columbia, has played up the connection, perhaps to emphasize that Nas, who is 10 years into his solo career and sells well into the millions, has never been closer to his roots. But the collaboration stretches as far back as Nas and Mr. Dara can remember.

"I started him on trumpet at 3 or 4," Mr. Dara said a few days before Thanksgiving, in an interview that took place during a family dinner at a Midtown steakhouse. "He was a little phenom, playing on stoops in the neighborhood," and for the after-work crowd on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn.

"I never gave him lessons - he had a natural knack for musical instruments - but his lip swelled up, and I told him to chill out until he got to be 7 or 8," Mr. Dara continued. "He cried, hard, but by the time he was 7 and we'd moved to Queensbridge, he'd lost interest."

Mr. Dara, who looks much younger than his 64 years, is smaller and slighter than his son, but the two men have the same easy way about them. Over dinner, each spoke tenderly to the other, and both said they had never had a fight or argument: even Nas's dropping out of school, after the eighth grade, was "a joint decision," they both said. In subsequent years, Nas would spend some time dealing drugs; his best friend was killed and his brother shot. "I was separated from Nas's mother at the time, so I couldn't protect him as much as I wanted to," Mr. Dara says.

"For us," Nas says, "family values are what they are due to how a family survives. A family that's brutalized, racially profiled, systematically destroyed. How does that family survive? We survive one way, that family survives another way. But in hip-hop, there's no one else who comes from a musical family that's around, that's relevant, that can come together like we have."

"That's a powerful message - and a dangerous one, because a lot of people don't want to see a black man with his father," Nas continued. "But this is our story, our blues. Nas speaks of Nas's travels. Olu speaks of Olu's travels. And we got together to say that maybe if the today's father sticks around, he can influence his child to be an Olu or a Nas."

Nas's lyrics draw heavily on his experiences in the projects. "Everything I do is gangsta," he says. "The style is gangsta. The voice is gangsta. I like the street. The street is all I know. I don't like the soft, Negro rappers."

But for all the grit and fury in Nas's music, it's easy to hear echoes of his father's relaxed style and all-encompassing record collection in Nas's flow, which is swift, swinging and jazzy. "The concepts are the same," Mr. Dara says. "And the storytelling. We came into the world at different times, and we see the world differently. But we are father and son, you know."

"Actually," Nas says, "I admire his career more than mine. My thing is the thing of the hip-hop star. Bodyguards and all of that. He traveled the world and went places I was scared to go, while I stayed here and took the easy route."

And though his records outsell Mr. Dara's 40 to 1, Nas has found that his brand of celebrity isn't necessarily better. "Olu knew all of New York, but he was cool walking down the street," Nas says. "People who see me on the street say, Oh, Nas, I love you! Then they run to the next guy they see on TV. I wish the real people were into me and I made a living off them alone."

If Mr. Dara's experiences have encouraged Nas to root his music in deeper soil than most hip-hop histories allow for, both men see themselves as part of a musical conversation that refuses to acknowledge aesthetic and generational divides. "What some people call a split, we call creativity," Mr. Dara says. "Black music, black art - it changes. We're making this stuff all the time, every moment. You can take a ride into Harlem right now and you'll hear blues, jazz, gospel, hip-hop - right there, all in one place."

As his father scans the dessert tray, Nas adds: "Hip-hop wasn't mainstream when I was a kid. It wasn't considered an art form. There weren't really any rich rappers. I got into it because that's what I loved. It's what my neighborhood was. It's what I was. And now, we're finally going to see hip-hop get old. Were going to see it have the same life span as jazz or B. B. King. When I'm 60 years old and LL Cool J has a show, I'll be in the front row. I mean, who else am I going to go see?"

                                                                              --Keith Bedford for The New York Times

Nas and his father, Olu Dara. The older musician plays on two tracks of the rapper's new album, and the two appear in a video together. "Actually," Nas says, "I admire his career more than mine."