Rapper Nas Drops Controversial Album Title

Freedom of speech is a complicated animal. Everyone remembers the commotion and consequence that followed Don Imus’s aired comments about the Rutgers Womens’ Basketball team a year or so ago, and many subsequent responses have ensued. Last fall, Queens hip-hop artist Nas sparked a heated debate when he announced that his ninth record would carry the racially charged title, Nigger, in response to Imus’s comments.

Freedom of speech is a complicated animal. Everyone remembers the commotion and consequence that followed Don Imus’s aired comments about the Rutgers Womens’ Basketball team a year or so ago, and many subsequent responses have ensued. Last fall, Queens hip-hop artist Nas sparked a heated debate when he announced that his ninth record would carry the racially charged title, Nigger, in response to Imus’s comments. According to Entertainment Weekly, executives at the Def Jam Music Group supported his decision for the album, to be released July 1. In denial of reports that label executives were uncomfortable with the title, Def Jam Chair Antonio Reid stated, “We stand firmly behind and beside our artists with pride and pleasure.” 

Last week, however, in response to renewed pressure and rumors that some stores may boycott the LP, Nas announced that he would be dropping the title in order to get the album to fans as quickly as possible. “The streets have been waiting for this for a long time,” he said, and he is not discouraged. Regardless of the official title, “people will always know… what to call it.” When asked why he decided to drop the name, Nas responded, “Everybody is trying to stop [it]… it’s just people being scared of what’s real.” Vietnam and civil rights eras saw their share of harmonic protest and celebration. Today, social arguments continue to rage over who should be able to use different types of language, as evident in the debates between Nas and music retailers, Imus and radio broadcasters, to name a few.

Throughout the past half-century of recorded music, direct and indirect political messages have become more and more prevalent. The “Vanilla” recordings of the 1950’s seemed to indicate that white artists could sell better than black artists during the time—an idea that would be attacked in decades to come. In the 1960s, Bob Dylan became one of the first musicians to fuse social messages with rock and roll, and the

Contemporary rhetorical theorist Judith Butler once argued that the meaning of hate speech is vulnerable to the context in which it’s uttered. She argued that by taking such speech into new contexts—such as from the words of a white DJ to the title of a black rapper’s next album—its effects may be transformed. Nas seems to have taken this idea to heart, and regardless of the ultimate title of the album, he told MTV he had accomplished his goal of “opening up dialogue for people to talk.” As it turns out, the social power of music remains in tact.