Though Nas’ Untitled album came out over a month ago, it has still been a topic of discussion that goes beyond music. Speaking on Tavis Smiley’s PBS show, Nas explained his intentions with the album, as well as an American media that could be flipped upside down.
Knowing that his title was controversial from the get go, Nas was adamant about the need to push something that he believed in, much like legendary artists before his time. “It’s important to roll the dice. Anything in life, it’s important to roll the dice. You’ve got to challenge yourself all the time…The artists I used to love took chances, from Marvin to John Lennon to even Hendrix.”Nas continued, “When you first get in the music business you’re excited to be there, [and] you want to make records that everybody’s loving. But after you got years in the game, you want to give people the real side of you, show people some character, and that’s the stage I’m at right now.”
One of Nas’ biggest foes has ultimately been White-agenda media that questionably castrates African-Americans as inferior, something of which Nas contests has been present since the beginning. “They look down on us like we’re the dirt of society, you know what I mean? That’s just the way they looked at us and they continue to look at us.” With this in mind, Nas expressed what the future may hold for American media and its current influences. “They’re going to wake up and it’s going to be too late – we’re going to own all the TV networks, we’re going to own all the radio stations, we’re going to own it all. And by then, it’s too late – you should have been understanding of where we were going with this instead of looking down at us like animals, man.”
