Digital Chaos Media

For our virgin Weekly Album Review I guess I should lay down the idea and the format: One album a week, at least, rated on a song-by-song basis.  Each song starts as a 10, and moves towards 1 the more it disappoints.  Add up the songs, divide by the total possible for the album, and there’s your rating.  This format favors shorter albums without a skippable track, because this author favors albums where the listener doesn’t have to shuffle through trash to find the diamonds.

Speaking for myself, I don’t plan on sticking to one genre, but at some point this list will hopefully be pretty comprehensive as far as rock and hip-hop are concerned.  If you’re here for techno reviews, you should probably save yourself the trouble and click on… In the future, I hope to review certain albums before their retail release, in order to provide some insight as to whether or not they are purchase-worthy.

It shouldn’t be a surprise where we start: Nasir Jones.  This author was always a little more Ether than Superugly.  His newest offering, Untitled, was surrounded by a flurry of pre-release media attention over its anticipated original title, N*gger.  It’s unfortunate that the title of the album drew more interest than some of the songs leaked before the record dropped, because what audiences should have been anticipating was Nas’ first focused effort in a long time.  Illmatic - Hip Hop will certainly be approached at some point on this site, so my argument that Nas lacked conceptual focus in at least 5 of those 8 albums will have to wait.  To the present subject:

Nas - Untitled (84)

1: Queens Get the Money (10)

The song is 2 minutes and 12 seconds long.  The only difficulty with ranking the song reflects its brevity; it otherwise stands as a perfect track.  The producer, Jay Electronica, is not well known in the hip-hop industry for anything yet, but he gained Nas’ faith by submitting to the author a remix and rewriting of “The World is Yours” (can you imagine how many reworkings of Illmatic songs this man must have heard by now?).  While we don’t hear his voice on the track, Jay’s creativity speaks through the backdrop he gives his artist here.  The song samples the I Am Sam theme song (a movie with it’s own interesting musical back-story), and it provides the type of ambiance Nas belongs in, a musical environment that lends itself better to introspection and lyricism than to chain dangling and club banging.  Jones works the song well, effectively bypasses a chorus and quits while he’s ahead.  “Queens Get the Money” isn’t the best leadoff track on a Nas album, that accolade belongs to “Get Down,” but I can’t think of a more fitting way to begin Untitled. 

2: You Can’t Stop Us Now (8)

“Betsy Ross sewed the first American flag, I bet she had a n*gger with her to help her old ass.”  Woven through the illustrious history of the white American is the unavoidably linked history of the black American - this theme is played on throughout the album, the revisiting and reworking of a married history is the arch on which the listener travels.  Working through this song reveals line after line of well-linked and evocative ideas.  There is a flaw, and this song does not receive the highest rating because of it: the second verse supposes that the time a gang member receives for abusing his dog is linked to his color and, viewed in a global context, disproportionate to the crime.  This is an album about, more than anything else, America.  The dog is a revered companion animal in America.  A better muse is deserved.  Salaam Remi, as usual, works the production tightly and appropriately for the subsequent lyrics and the song ends rewardingly with an interesting play on the legacy of Sammy Davis.

3: Breathe (6)

“Breathe” reflects a problem that Nas has had on every one of his albums, save Illmatic and Stillmatic.  He isn’t great at running out consistently flawless production.  Some artists are.  Jay-Z is great at it.  50 Cent cherrypicks pretty well.  I’d even cite Atmosphere here way before Nas.  Hometown Jadakiss is pretty deaf to good production as well; this type of thing effects many rappers.  Anyway, “Breathe” is, more than anything else, boring.  It seems to allow that Nas has somebody, or many people, telling him to lighten up; to off the shadowy beats he’s usually so good over.  And, when the production isn’t there, neither, historically, has Mr. Jones been.  There are few tracks which lay a great foundation that Nas does not take advantage of.  If you listen to the first 10 seconds of a Nas song, you can generally tell what you’re going to get from him lyrically.  At one end of the spectrum, we get a Primo beat and “NY State of Mind” is born; at the other, it’s Dustin Moore, who I thankfully don’t know much about, and “Breath.”  Some of the lyrics are OK.  “The pestilence of the ghetto informed me as a shorty to push nothin’ less than a 740,” is a highpoint.  All in all, “Breathe” offers little focus, and ends unfittingly with the lyric, “Breathe… America we gotta be free,” without having built on the previously discussed jail-time this conclusion points to.

4: Make the World Go Round (4)

I don’t want to spend much time on this song, but I will say that a number of points I hit on in the review of “Breathe” are exacerbated here.  This song was clearly intended as a single, it doesn’t fit well with the rest of the album, the lyrics aren’t very good, and the beat is bad.  Why Game is producing I couldn’t tell you, but he’s a good rapper, and he should stick to writing.  Nas’ lyrics are a poor man’s “Hate Me Now.”  I am reminded of “Braveheart Party,” a record that almost ruined Stillmatic (Mary J Blige really saved Nas’ ass on that one) and was clearly intended as a club track where one was not necessary.  I can’t for the life of me think of a reason why Chris Brown and Nas would ever need to collaborate artistically.

5: Hero (8)

While “Hero,” not “Make the World Go Round,” was actually Untitled’s first single, it isn’t defined by that intention.  It is a very good song, with a very catchy beat, that was released as a single because its merits encouraged that designation.  The production is effectively complex.  This is odd because Polow da Don is an R&B producer for the most part, and he hasn’t created many noteworthy songs.

6: America (8)

Nas moves his early-album agenda forward with “America.” The themes are recurring: wisdom in aging, sovereignty in wealth, questioning the freedom of speech. What Nas has done well for a long time is run through the pop-culture logs in American history and questioned how we define people through the lens of race – he continues that here. The lyrics are strong. The production is OK; Nas taps Norwegian production duo Stargate of Ne-Yo “So Sick” fame. The chorus is tinny and begins to wear on the listener after a minute or two.

7: Sly Fox (10)

Great song; perfect for this album. The beat is gnarly. Stic.man of Dead Prez can take credit for that. Nas takes a rivalry with Fox’s Bill O’Reilly onto his home court, banging the right-winger like a drum and taking his television station to task simultaneously.

8: Testify (9)

A strong effort in many ways, “Testify” is most interesting in its questioning of Nas’ largest fan base: white suburbia. Record industry statistics continue to point out that the demographic buying most hip-hop CD’s is white suburban. And so questions the artist, “would you stand with me, a United States murderer?” This reference to the beginning of the track, during with Nas kills three neo-Confederates, questions this odd dichotomy between the rap industry and the privileged white portion of its fan base. I’m not sure I understand the reference to Milton William Cooper towards the end of the song, though I will assume Nas points to Cooper’s anti-Semitic ramblings as an example of the near-racial tension between two groups of American white populations.

9: N.I.G.G.E.R. (9)

10: Untitled (9)

11: Fried Chicken (10)

A clearly original idea executed perfectly. Little explanation is needed; the song is both obvious and subtle. Mark Ronson’s start-from-scratch production is excellent.

12: Project Roach (9)

Every race has its way of marginalizing a subset of its own people. For American whites, the words used are cr*cker and redneck, etc., for American blacks the word is n*gger and this is the point of view from which Nas speaks as a particularly eloquent roach.

13: Y’all My N*ggas (9)

14: We’re Not Alone (8)

The idea seems to be that, regardless of the race of the small percentage of people who maintain power in America, that those who are effectively disenfranchised are both the majority and a diverse racial, multi-cultural population. The roaches are black, white, red and yellow. The roaches are us. This is, at first glance, an odd companion piece to what follows in “Black President.” The assertion in the final song is that we are in fact ready to elect a black American to the premier American political office, but that man, Barack Obama is a production of many of the institutions that Nas questions throughout Untitled isn’t he? He certainly is, but these ideas aren’t irreconcilable, Nas has been trumpeting the idea that knowledge unwinds elitism since his Belly days.

15: Black President (9)

Sum It Up:

All in all, Untitled is a cohesive idea molded into a musical format with a lot of success. There are some flaws, and if you look at an album the way I do, as a single piece of artistic representation, akin to a painting, then one sloppy corner can distract from an otherwise pretty picture. Nas has put together something very, very good here, but let’s not mistake Untitled for what I’ve heard some people call it, the new Illmatic.