NaS Lost: A Tribute to the Little Homey

Nas Lost: A Tribute to the Little Homey

By Byron Crawford

Cover by Theotis Jones

Copyright 2013 Byron Crawford

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table of Contents

Preface: This Really Is a Tribute

Nas Will Prevail, in a Sense

The Heavy Lifting

The Sauce Is the Boss

Shark Niggas (Biters)

Everyone's Had a Ride

Can't Hardly Wait

A One Hot Album Every 10 Year Average

Ethered

Secret Lovers

Bite My Tongue for No One (Nullus)

Dreaded N-Word

We All Need Somebody to Lean On

They Shootin'!

Going Back to Africa

Found Out About You

Always Go for the Money Shot

Destiny's Birth Control

Hustling Backwards

Running with the Devil

Opinions Are Like Assholes

About the Author

Preface: This Really Is a Tribute

This is the best song in the world... tribute. – Tenacious D

I look at it like this: If it's a book about someone who's done something worthwhile at some point in time or another, then it's a tribute... of sorts. If it's a book about someone who never once in their entire life made a worthwhile contribution to humanity, then it wouldn't be a tribute. A book about Tyler the Creator, for example, wouldn't be a tribute, though I might call it that anyway, because I find that sort of thing amusing.

Relax, Tyler the Creator fans. I couldn't fathom writing an entire book about him, even if I thought it had the potential to rank highly at Amazon (one of the main things I take into consideration when deciding what to write a book about these days). True, the upwards of 8,000 words I wrote about Odd Future in my last book, Infinite Crab Meats, did seem to just flow from my fingertips, this despite my presumably decreased zinc levels due to my other afternoon hobby.

Or does that not have any effect on your writing?

It's necessary for me to state at the outset that this is, in fact, a tribute because I've developed a reputation over the past 10 years or so as someone who lives to mock rappers, and for the most part, yeah, it is well-deserved.

I started blogging in college, back in the early 2000s, to pass the time I wasn't spending making sweet, passionate love to a series of beautiful women, and to share my views on important topics such as 9/11, Bobby Brown and some of the developmentally disabled kids I went to high school with. My career really kicked into high gear after I graduated, in 2004, mostly because I didn't have shit else to do. I spent a couple of years interviewing for every decent-paying job I could find, but to no avail, and flipping burgers in the meantime to make the rent in the series of shit holes I lived in with other guys in similar situations.

It's not true what they say, that if you work hard, stay out of trouble, stay in school and get a degree, you'll at least be able to find a job that pays a living wage. You could just as easily end up shit out of luck.

In 2004, I spearheaded a campaign to have Kanye West banned from the Grammys on the grounds that he didn't write his own lyrics, at least in the case of Jesus Walks, one of the main songs he was nominated for that year, but who knows how much, if any of his rhymes he actually writes? It seems odd that he would pay someone to write some of the rhymes he's kicked over the years, but look at some of the MCs he's surrounded himself with. Maybe that's the best they could do.

There was a petition that was widely circulated throughout the Internets and even mentioned in some mainstream media outlets, including one of those drive-time radio shows for older black people – one of those ones that occasionally host a cruise, where everyone dresses like broke pimps, listens to Frankie Beverly and Maze and celebrates the fact that they're too old to impregnate each other anymore. Those shows hold a lot of sway in the black community, and I'm sure they're responsible for a lot of the amazing commercial success of Tyler Perry (along with those chain emails about the expiration of the Voting Rights Act and the Jena 6).

I'm not sure how many signatures it received at the time, because it picked up a lot more signatures years later, after Kanye interrupted Taylor Swift's acceptance speech at MTV's Video Music Awards. If I'd been there that night, I would have slapped the shit out of Kanye, in part because Taylor Swift is so adorable and maybe she'd be impressed, and in part because I just plain disagree with what he said. I don't #fuxwit Beyoncé musically.

In 2006, I began blogging for XXL magazine's website. Shortly thereafter, I was involved in one of my most famous beefs to date, with Bun B of UGK. I'd written a review of T.I.'s album King, in which I jokingly suggested that Pimp C, who made a guest appearance on the album, should be thrown back in jail, because I didn't like his verse. Later, I referred to this in one of my posts for XXL, and one of Bun B's PCP carriers must have seen it and emailed him a link to it. Bun let loose in the comments section with a diatribe about how I'm the kind of person who throws rocks at people and hides behind a bush (I've never once done such a thing), including what I interpreted to be thinly veiled threats to pop a cap in my ass.

So of course I responded to this with a series of posts in which I both skewered Bun B's retarded comment and revealed the real reason – as far as I know – why Pimp C was locked up in the first place, which I'll maintain to this day really is something I read on a message board back in college, probably okayplayer, from someone who was there at the time. (Supposedly, Pimp C went to a mall in Texas with an AK-47 tucked into his fur coat and pulled it out on a woman.)

I was with XXL for just about five years exactly. It was February of '06 when they asked me if I'd like to contribute (on the strength, natch), and it was the beginning of March 2011, a day or two shy of my 30th birthday, when I was unceremoniously let go. XXL likes to get rid of people on their birthdays. When Elliott Wilson was fired, under mysterious circumstances (rumors circulated that management found a baggie of coke in his desk), after a 10-year stint as editor in chief, it was his birthday.

A few days before management at Harris Publications had someone from the tech department change my login, and didn't even bother to tell me about it (I only found out when I emailed someone to ask why my password didn't work), I was involved in an incident with the aforementioned Tyler the Creator. I suggested that his group, which had been presented as a grassroots success story, was being astroturfed, and I also drew the obvious connection between Odd Future, Juggalos, and the kid who shot Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Some people suspect that this led to my firing, but I'm not sure. It could just be that management wanted to shift its focus to more aggregation and less original content. There aren't enough strong writers in the hip-hop community to put together a site like what I was trying to do at XXL back in the mid to late '00s, and there aren't very many avid readers anyway.

You can imagine the success I've had, in the past couple of years, trying to become an author in this field.

***

Certainly, Nas is someone who could serve as fodder, if you're the kind of person who still spends his afternoons sitting around on the Internets talking shit about rappers.

More so than maybe anyone else in all of hip-hop, Nas has developed a reputation as someone who put out one really good album, a long, long time ago, and hasn't put out anything nearly as good since. Sure, I can think of literally millions of other examples of artists who never topped their first album (or their first great album, if they didn't quite hit the mark until their second or third album) – most artists are only really, really good for an album or two, if they're ever that good. The difference is, most artists aren't allowed to continue to release as many albums as Nas has released after they've lost the plot. At a certain point, Warner Bros. decided it was done putting out Big Daddy Kane albums. If he had a security code to their corporate offices, they must have changed it (and probably didn't tell him about it). Nas, on the other hand, may never stop putting out albums.

As I write this, he's not even 40 years old yet, and yet it feels like he's been around since forever. In a sense, he has. The guy's been on the scene since I was in elementary school, and I'm rapidly barreling towards old age. Somehow, he was an adult when I was still a child, but now we're both in our 30s. Tha fuck? And it doesn't help matters that I'm a grisled, old-ass 32. If I were to drop dead watching American Idol on some random white chick's sofa like Charlie Parker in the movie Bird (and also, I guess, in real life), a medical examiner could easily mistake me for a 50 year-old man. Years of hard living will do that to you. Not being able to afford as much beer as I'd like to drink on many a night now has been my only saving grace.

There's a few younger rappers out here keeping hope alive for aging haters like me, guys like Action Bronson, Meyhem Lauren and Roc Marciano, and even those guys aren't that young. And that's it. For the most part, the best rappers out right now could double as some of your friends parents from back when you were in high school, if you went to a school with a lot of black kids, and those kids' fathers were somehow still around, despite the fact that they were apparently degenerates. Okay, bad analogy. But you catch my drift. Hip-hop used to be a young man's sport, and now it's an old man's sport (well, to the extent that there could be such a thing as an old man's sport). More and more often these days, you hear about rappers dropping dead, having strokes and needing organ transplants. Bonecrusher was pictured riding around a mall in a Rascal scooter. Tone Loc passes out on stage at a state fair every six months or so.

With Nas' recent problems with the IRS and questionable investments, including purchasing a stake in a magazine that went out of business five years ago and his role as a black public cosigner with the controversial Rap Genius, he may continue recording for a while still. He may be less than halfway through his career, at this point.

*shudders at the thought*

To be sure, Nas' output post-Illmatic hasn't been all terrible. I don't know that he's put out an album I would listen to all the way through (I'm not gonna pretend to be that familiar with his oeuvre, I'm just writing a book about it LOL), but I'm sure I could put together discs and discs of pretty good songs, if I spent the time to sift through so many failed commercial attempts and conceptual mishaps. And I do think it's true that people's perception of Nas' career has been unfairly molded by the argument Jay-Z put forth in Takeover, that Nas put out one hot album, at the beginning of his career, and the rest of them have been lame. Many people on the Internets will argue that Nas' second album, It Was Written, was nearly as good as Illmatic, albeit in a way different style. Of course I don't find this to be true, but I'll admit to having spent quite a bit of time listening to It Was Written back in '96. Like, enough that I'd feel weird saying, if I knew the exact amount. That was still a year or so before I began driving. I didn't even listen to as much rap music once I became something along the lines of a professional rap critic.

Lest we forget, Jay-Z was pissed at Nas when he wrote Takeover because he'd been obsessed with Nas for years, listening to Illmatic backstage at concerts a good half-decade after the fact, as seen in that film about the Hard Knock Life tour, and even going so far as to seek out Nas' baby's mother for sweet, passionate lovemaking, I guess in hope that her vagine somehow contained the secret, and he was upset because, if memory serves me correctly, he couldn't get Nas to rhyme on a song. What's the likelihood, really, that Jay-Z doesn't also love It Was Written? I'll answer that for you: There is none. It Was Written has plasticky Trackmasters production, compared to the classic boom-bap production on Illmatic, and therefore isn't good, but Jay-Z loaves, lurves, luffs garbage, plastic-sounding production, and that's why he's filled so many of his albums with it. Listen to In My Lifetime, Vol. 1 again, if you haven't in a while. (Don't actually listen to In My Lifetime, Vol. 1.)

The point I'm trying to make here is that people will believe anything that's said in a rap song. And by people, I mean dumbass people who listen to rap music. That's why hip-hop has become such a powerful tool for selling Sprite, Chicken McNuggets and expensive tennis shoes. A while back, some salty-ass hater pointed out that the main reason so many people believe that Biggie Smalls is the greatest rapper of all time, or even know the date he was assassinated, is because Canibus said it on Second Round K.O.

At least it happened to be true.

Because of their beef in 2001, because they're Eskimo brothers (which is for life), and because they were born out of the same milieu, in New York back in the mid '90s, along with the likes of Biggie Smalls and Raekwon and Ghostface Killah, Nas will forever be linked with Jay-Z. As Jay-Z once famously remarked, in part for the purpose of mentioning himself in the same breath as Nas and Biggie, people in the Marcy Projects spend all day arguing about who's the best MC, Biggie, Jay-Z or Nas. (And that's why they live in the Marcy Projects.)

And Nas will always suffer by comparison to Jay-Z, because while Nas' career has become synonymous with a certain kind of artistic failure, Jay-Z's career has become just as synonymous with success in business. If there was a way of quantifying this (I could probably invent one), Jay-Z probably hasn't had any more good ideas than Nas. He has more albums that are well-liked than Nas, but he also has a dumber fanbase. But who gives a shit – the guy's got like half a billion dollars! Between himself and Beyoncé, who makes more money than he does year in and year out (which I'm sure is still difficult, regardless of how much money you have), he's alleged to have a billion dollars. Nas, meanwhile, has no money at all, for all intents and purposes. It's been announced that Nas owes money to the IRS, and why would you owe money to the IRS, if you could afford to pay it? Take this from someone who's saving up to pay the $120 he owes for the ~$8,000 he made in 2012. A tax bill is not like a light bill. You can't just put something on it. They'll throw your ass in jail!

If Nas hadn't become such a tragic failure, if he didn't lose the plot creatively after Illmatic, or if he did but he somehow managed to make a shedload of money in the process (which is acceptable in the black community), I'm sure I would appreciate him that much more, but I don't know that I'd have much use for him as a writer. I'd have more of his albums on my phone, but would I be writing this book? This shtick I've come up with is all about celebrating people's shortcomings. I could write a book all about only things I like, things we should celebrate, people who have made good decisions, but who would want to read that? Even people who claim they would want to read something like, the a-holes who pop up in the comment section of my blog wanting to know if I've ever liked anything before in life, wouldn't actually read it, if they even know how to read. Blogs that refuse to say anything negative about an artist, especially a major label artist, if you notice, don't publish much writing one way or the other.

If you're a Nas stan, it's likely that you're not gonna like a lot of what I have to say in this book, but take it in the spirit in which it's intended (and definitely continue reading and make sure you actually paid for your copy of this book). The reason why Nas is so ripe to skewer is because he has the ability to make the best rap music possible, and he just doesn't, ever. But hey, at least he does have that talent. Buried somewhere. If he didn't, I can't say that I wouldn't write about him, or that I wouldn't enjoy doing it (I've written about some terrible rappers over the years, and not because it pays well, obvs), but it wouldn't be as effective rhetorically. This is like when your parents beat the shit out of you with a race car track or an extension cord, but only because they love you, and you made a bad decision, and they want to see you do better.

Well, I would imagine it is, but how should I know? My parents swung a belt at me a few times when I was a kid, but there was never any pretense of it being some sort of learning experience. They were just emotionally immature, in the way that most baby boomers are, and frustrated about something that didn't have anything to do with me. How much bad could I