“Hip Hop Is Dead.” That’s the title of the impressive new album by the rapper Nas. It is meant to inspire a reaction, and so far it has. The album isn’t even in shops yet (it will be released on Dec. 19), and in any case Nas doesn’t name names, but some rappers have already responded to the charge.
During a recent interview with the rapper turned radio host Monie Love, on the Philadelphia-area station the Beat (100.3 FM), the Atlanta rapper Young Jeezy took exception to the notion that hip-hop has expired. He suggested that Nas was merely a grumpy New York veteran, pining for a bygone era.
“I don’t think hip-hop is dead at all,” he said. “It’s just a new day and time, it’s a new story, it’s a new movement.” Young Jeezy sounded not just irritated but wounded too, asking, “I’m-a respect his craft, he ain’t gon’ respect mine?” Somehow a vague album title had come to seem like a personal insult.
Young Jeezy has reason to be sensitive. New York’s long-dominant hip-hop scene has been slumping while Southern hip-hop has been surging, and Southern rappers are often blamed for hip-hop’s alleged decline But Nas has conspicuously declined to assign blame. In a recent Pitchfork interview, he said, “You’d be an idiot to think I’m talking about how the South killed hip-hop.”
So what is he talking about exactly? Nas first made his name 15 years ago, with an appearance on a track called “Live at the Barbecue,” by Main Source; on his classic 1994 debut album, “Illmatic,” he perfected a dense, rat-a-tat rhyme style that built upon the legacy of 1980s pioneers like Rakim and Big Daddy Kane. Even as a rookie he was a traditionalist, and in the years since then he has tried (with mixed results) to figure out his place in hip-hop’s mutating landscape.
As a result he has sometimes seemed like a professional throwback, yearning for the good old days. (In tribute to his own good old days, he named his 2001 album “Stillmatic.”) And the new CD, “Hip Hop Is Dead” (Def Jam),is partly a lament for what we have lost: “Heinous crimes help record sales more than creative lines/And I don’t wanna keep bringing up the greater times/But I’m a dreamer, nostalgic with the state of mind.”
At least Nas and Young Jeezy agree on one thing: Hip-hop has changed. But how? Nas is a formalist, obsessed with the way rappers put words together. And his album is full of insinuations that today’s rappers care more about money than craft. (In the title track he raps, “Everybody sound the same/Commercialized the game/Reminiscin’ when it wasn’t all business.”)
By contrast many younger rappers, including Young Jeezy, view hip-hop primarily as a culture, not a craft; as Jeezy put it during the radio interview, “Hip-hop is a way of life.” Instead of attacking Nas’s rhymes, he attacked Nas’s criminal credentials, asking: “Has Nas did anything he talk about? Has Nas been on the block? Do Nas have street credibility? Is any of his homeys in the feds?”
To anyone listening, Young Jeezy’s outburst might have sounded like a non sequitur. Who cares if Nas has friends in federal prisons? But Nas uses this kind of rhetoric too. (On the new album he tells one pretender, “You a kid, you don’t live what you rap about.”) And in any case there is lots to be said for the culturalist view, which gives rappers license to break formal rules so long as they honor cultural ones, to ignore old history so long as they pay attention to current context.
Instead of worrying about similes and detailed narrative, Southern hip-hop often emphasizes beats, nonverbal expressions (grunts and groans for instance), party chants, sing-song cadences. This has helped keep hip-hop fresh, and it wouldn’t have happened if all rappers shared Nas’s commitment to old-fashioned rapping. The obsession with ghetto verisimilitude has forced rappers to pay attention to neighborhood sights and sounds and audiences.
There are moments in “Hip Hop Is Dead” when Nas comes across as a humorless scold. In “Carry On Tradition,” he raps, “I got an exam, let’s see if y’all pass it/Let’s see who can quote a Daddy Kane line the fastest.” For a moment Nas sounds like one of his more pedantic fans. And although he has long sought to place hip-hop in the broader context of African-American culture, sometimes his scholarship seems more like mere name-dropping. Before one song, there is the sound of a cigarette lighter flaring, then Nas says, “Yo, I wonder if Langston Hughes and Alex Haley got blazed before they told stories.”
But here’s the thing about Nas’s old-fashioned approach to hip-hop: It still works. Especially if you’ve got a smoky voice, a knack for packing syllables into tight rhyme schemes and access to sturdy backbeats by Kanye West, Dr. Dre, Scott Storch, will.i.am and others. Fifteen years on, there’s still nothing like hearing Nas assemble an intricate stanza:
From crack-pushers to ’Lac pushers, and ambushers
And morticians to fortresses,
Case-dismissers, laced in riches, caked ridiculous.
From nickel-and-dimin’ to trickin’ them diamonds.
As you can tell from those rhymes, this album isn’t solely given over to complaints. The hip-hop history lessons lie side by side with crime stories and defiant boasts and shameless showboating. There are guest appearances from the Game; Nas’s wife, Kelis; and Nas’s former foe Jay-Z, who is now president of Def Jam. (He helped lure Nas to the label.)
Nas finds ways to remind listeners that he’s obsessed with language; the final track, “Hope,” has no beat at all, just a sung chorus and a series of a cappella rhymes. But this album is also a reminder that the gap between a rapper like Nas and a rapper like Young Jeezy really isn’t so wide, after all.
The best line in the title track isn’t a pronouncement about the genre’s future or history, it’s a slick update of an old hip-hop threat: “The bigger the cap, the bigger the peelin’/Come through something ill, missin’ the ceilin’.” As those syllables rattle around in his mouth, he sounds every bit as exuberant as a teenager.
“Hip Hop Is Dead” flirts with a big, unanswerable question: Has Nas saved old-fashioned hip-hop? Who knows? Who even knows what that means? But this grumpy, lovable album definitively answers a much smaller question. Has old-fashioned hip-hop saved Nas? Definitely. And not for the first time. Maybe not the last either.
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