This is yet another example of the controversy over whether art imitates life or vice versa. Rapper Nas, born Nasir Jones, has refused to step down from being bold in his delivery at the pulpit of hip-hop.
He was recently interviewed on CNN about the effect of Hip Hop on the recent death of Chicago Honor Roll student Derrion Albert.
But then CNN proceeded to use his “Shoot ‘em Up” song from the album Nastradamus to give an example of his body of work. Of course, the excerpt is more violent than a lot of his other work.
He could only respond with the fact that the media attacks him with his violent songs and not the songs that he has written to build up the youth. We recently displayed his “Open Letter to Young Warriors” on EURweb.com addressing the youth in Chicago and their destructive behavior which CNN used to clean up the reference with later.
Nas explained that his music is drawn from his experiences and not from a make believe world that we would like to hear about.
If you remember the very strange Marilyn Manson, he wrote an essay 10 years ago called “Columbine: Whose Fault Is It?” when his music was referenced during the Columbine shootings. A very profound quote from that essay stated:
“It is sad to think that the first few people on earth needed no books, movies, games or music to inspire cold-blooded murder. The day that Cain bashed his brother Abel’s brains in, the only motivation he needed was his own human disposition to violence.”
See the Nas interview here. Shame on you CNN!
-J.C. Brooks
October 8th, 2009 at 10:15 am
Peace J.C. Great post, glad you caught this interview. I think a lot of people missed it and the ones that saw it (outside of the core hip hop community familiar with Nas’ work) kinda took it at face value that Nas is just another thug MC. The thing is that the interview was slanted against Nas from the beginning. CNN used a few basic media and PR tricks to set this up and make Nas look like an ass. I broke down the situation on a post on my site. Check it out if you’re interested in media criticism. http://boothish.wordpress.com/2009/10/07/the-problem-with-the-cnn-don-lemmon-nas-interview You’re doing some good work on this blog. I’ll be checking back. Keep it up. -k