Nas: Nas

With his Def Jam debut, Hip

Hop Is Dead, Nas

tried to save hip-hop, or at least set it back on the right course. On his

follow-up, he's attempting something really ambitious: a wide-ranging

meditation on racial and label politics, the media, Barack Obama, the aborted

original title of the album (Nigger), and America's tortured racial history. Like

Chuck D back in the day, Nas has much trouble on his mind: With Nas, he's made an epically

overreaching album about pretty much everything. It's part Hip Hop Is Dead-style urban manifesto,

part op-ed piece minus a thesis. Yet what it lacks in cohesion and focus, it

makes up for in ambition and scope. Rarely has a major-label rapper tried to

say so much on a single album.

Nas

hooked up with producers Cool & Dre, dreamy singer Chris Brown, and rapper

The Game on the poppy, out-of-place "Make The World Go Round," and had Polow Da

Don whip up a state-of-the-art synthesizer symphony on the first single,

"Hero," but otherwise, he opts for a spare, haunted sound that puts the

emphasis on rhymes rather than beats. His essentially untitled album features

collaborations with The Last Poets and Dead Prez's stic.man, but it'd be easier

to take him seriously as a political thinker if he didn't litter his rhymes

with references to aliens ("We're Not Alone") and conspiracy theories. Nas finds a wonderful groove

in its final third, as the rapper takes a break from heady theorizing to rap

allegorically from the perspective of a cockroach and pens a love song to fried

chicken. The album-closing "Black President" poignantly samples 2Pac, fretting,

"although it seems heaven-sent, we ain't ready to have a black president" as a

springboard to contemplate the prospect that Obama could prove 2Pac wrong. True

to form, Nas is skeptical, cautiously optimistic, and deeply invested in the

soul and future of hip-hop and a country he both loves and hates.