Gimme Friction

Nas

by J. Edward Keyes

Bill O'Reilly's attack on Nas was one of the more bizarre dust-ups of the last year, making good fodder for conservative and hip-hop bloggers alike. The roots of the controversy are preposterous: O'Reilly took issue with the lyrics of Nas' "Shoot 'Em Up," a song he almost certainly had never heard until some eager intern handed him a Google printout in hopes of somersaulting into a paying job. The song is an in-character murder fantasy — a stray dark mark at the center of an otherwise socially conscious career. Had O'Reilly skipped backward just two songs, he would have heard a sobering and startlingly well-drawn study of life in the projects. There are musicians of every stripe who genuinely revel in nihilism and destruction, but Nas is not one of them, and so the scuffle became a bit like picking on the honors student for not properly clapping the erasers while a gang of coked-up ruffians sneak out back and burn down the school.

Nas' retort, as it turns out, is just as artless but somehow more effective. Titled "Sly Fox," it finds Nas breathlessly running through a string of allegations, among them, "The Fox has a bushy tail/ and Bush tells lies/ and Fox trots." That song comes near the middle of a record that has no title, though anyone within peering distance of a computer screen knows full well what the title was meant to be. There are a multitude of obvious reasons why Nas would choose to christen a record about race relations in America with an unprintable epithet, but there are subtler implications, as well. Hip-hop, since its inception, has been casually adopted by white fans who have a tendency to forget its significance is cultural as well as musical. Titling a record with a word those fans can't say out loud creates a constant state of friction, making for an album they can possess, but never really own.

Untitled isn't the finely honed treatise it wants to be, but it certainly has its moments. "America" finds Nas calmly and incisively running through the history of American inequalities over tearful gospel production, and "N.I.G.G.E.R.," the woulda-been title track, does the same over sweeping strings. And if the production occasionally falters and Nas periodically allows a few clunkers to slip by, the overall impact is still mighty. It's a pity Bill O'Reilly will probably never hear it.

(j_keyes@citypaper.net)