Poetry in America with Elisa New (2018–…): Season 1, Episode 11 - N.Y. State of Mind - full transcript
The following program
is rated TV-MA.
It contains language
that may not be suitable
for all audiences.
Viewer discretion is advised.
As I think about this kid
who wrote this when he was 17,
and I don't know how.
I just don't understand how.
He was about 20 years old
when the album was released,
so a lot of this
is coming of age, as a man,
I'm starting to understand
the world around me.
We should also think of him
as a musical, poetic prodigy,
that we see this
black boy genius
who has this
workman-like quality,
and lyrical precision and beauty
articulating all of that
in one song.
He's impeccable with words.
The way he puts his wordplay,
it's like a dance that he does.
Probably the most visual
storyteller,
you know, maybe ever in rap.
She'll bring you customers
I think Nas
is one of the greatest poets
not only hip hop has seen
but music has seen.
MC and NAS:
MC and NAS:
In 2002, Harvard University
opened the doors of the world's
first academic hip hop archive.
The archive's mission:
to provide an institutional home
for an artform
and cultural movement that had,
over the last 20 years,
achieved global importance.
In the fall of 2013,
when the Archive's
first research fellowship
was established,
it was named for Nasir Jones,
whose pioneering album,
Illmatic,
was just then being reissued in
a 20-year anniversary edition.
Visibly moved by the occasion,
Nas accepted the honor on behalf
of friends who had not survived,
and he offered tribute
to hip hop, the young art form
that gave scope
to his own talent.
Ask hip hop-heads,
and what they'll say is
it was Nas' artistry
that made rap an art form.
And so, Nas's technique
was where I started
when I spoke to him
after the Harvard ceremony,
and then a few months later
in L.A.
And his technique
was the first topic
of my conversation
with scholar Salamishah Tillet,
and then with a group
of Nas' friends and fans
who met me to discuss his work
at the headquarters of Genius,
a website for the analysis
and annotation
of musical and verbal texts,
including hip hop.
"Musician,
inflictin' composition of pain,
I'm like Scarface, sniffin'
cocaine, holdin' an M16,
see with the pen I'm extreme."
"Rappers, I monkey flip 'em,
"with the funky rhythm
I be kickin'."
That's a lot, just fitting
so many rhymes into, you know,
into the verse.
He's packing so much
in this piece.
And each word,
each line has a precision.
The same joy that you get
from saying, you know,
"Peter Piper picked a pepper."
You know what I'm saying?
It's the alliteration,
it's the repetition of sounds.
Well, his technical skill
was breakthrough at the time.
You know, there's internal
rhyme structure, too,
and, you know, the rhymes were
just kind of the last syllable,
and now he's doing this
two or three or four times
within two weeks, you know.
Any way he can,
he's inflicting the composition
of pain with the pen,
like, they don't know
how to take it.
He's so eloquent
with his wordplay
and with the words he choose
to use.
You're a rapper,
what do you mean "composition"?
How do put rapper in...
like, no one,
up to that point in time,
no one was actually looking
at the words and equating it to
art, or equating it to poetry.
How did he put these words
together
as a kid who didn't even
graduate high school?
How did he do that?
There's a language
of the subculture.
You know, certain neighborhoods,
spin... spin the words around
a lot different than others.
Italians say different things,
Irish say different things.
Jamaicans, forget about it.
They got a whole different way
of spinning words around, and...
That spinning words
as though it's a record.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So, I talk from that point
of view,
that-that language around
my neighborhood
that everybody uses.
Langston Hughes would say
"a river of language,"
that you... the language of
a neighborhood or a subculture,
and that you are honoring
the poetics
that exist in these
neighborhoods.
Yeah.
I'm a disciple of the streets.
Like, this is... the streets
is my world, it's everything.
And I'm from it.
I'm of it, I love it.
Was there a moment,
a different moment,
a moment with you thinking about
your own words?
It had to start
at a really early age for me.
You were eight or nine?
Seven, eight.
And you started to love
the sound of words.
You know, the first things that
get cut in the school system
are the music programs, right?
So, kids in New York
aren't learning
how to play instruments, right?
So how do they
express themselves?
They get their mother's
and father's disco records
and two turntables,
and they cut between
the beat break,
which is the part of the song
where it's just a drum break
with no words.
And you would cut
back and forth,
and you would extend that
for several minutes
so you can rhyme over
a part of the song
that didn't have words on it.
So Nas says, "I'm the smooth
criminal on beat breaks."
I noticed the power in poetry
through rap music
when I was a kid.
There was a guy named T La Rock,
and he made a song called
"It's Yours."
"Commentating, illustrating,
description giving, adjectives."
He was saying words
like a teacher would say,
but there was a rhythm to it
and the track,
the beat underneath of it
was hard,
and it was like he created
these visuals in my head,
and I said,
"This guy is amazing."
It was the very first
time that anyone in the art form
know how to put words together
that gave you specific,
specific, granular details
that had that level of texture.
"Bullet holes left
in my peepholes."
And so there, there's obviously
the double entendre
of peepholes being his people.
He's kind of meditating
or marking the everyday-ness
of black death, right?
Is there also, perhaps,
the door?
A peephole that people
shoot through.
Exactly.
There was a lot of incidents
where if you had a problem
with someone, they might...
They can't find you,
they might come to your door
and shoot through your peephole.
I mean, that was on the news
back then.
What else could peepholes be?
And then peepholes
being his...
what he's providing us, right?
He's a... he's the...
both muse, but the seer.
He's giving us a kind of insight
into this community.
The letter "I".
The letter "I".
Optical.
Yeah, optical or also,
the surveilling eye.
There's, you know,
there's a number of eyes
that I think are operating here.
...is like a maze
in all the stories
Peoples come back black
He compares the blocks to a maze
full of black rats trapped.
Which is interesting,
because the infrastructure
of Queensbridge looks,
from the top, like a maze.
You know, everybody's stacked
on top of each other there.
I don't even think
they picked up garbage
three times a week in New York
like they do now.
You know,
so you saw rats on the street,
and it really felt like a maze.
And, you know, when he says
"the Island is packed,"
he's, of course,
referring to Riker's Island.
At least a parallel to slavery
and a parallel to basically
being trapped in a life
and in a world
that you can't get out of.
Scarfacewas a
super influential film
among rappers in particular,
but, you know,
among everybody,
I think of that generation.
I mean,
that movie came out in 1983,
so by the time Nas
gets to writing his songs,
I bet he saw Scarface
several times, you know,
as a kid,
and started making the parallels
of what he saw
on that movie screen
and what was going on
in his neighborhood.
Visualizing himself
sort of in that, you know,
iconic movie role.
I guess back in the day,
when people were having
these critiques of hip hop
being so violent,
someone would misread that line
as him endorsing
a kind of hyper-violence.
Him saying
"with the pen I'm extreme"
I think sort of nods to
with the pen,
he becomes larger than life.
He can be Scarface with a pen.
I'm not saying like I want
to go and hurt somebody.
No, no.
- I'm just telling you
like how slick I am,
and it does go back to the pen,
but it's like
I'm just telling you I'm slick,
I can say things
that you didn't think of,
or I can do things you can't do.
The arsenal that
he's pulling from
is as deep and as heavy
and as strong as an M16.
You need credibility
as an artist, first,
and then for anything
that you say to matter.
He's announcing his arrival,
and then he's also like
dismissing those who,
in any way,
will contest his territory.
That is a description of poetry,
is having a particular
kind of power.
It's like my ID card,
it's like... all right,
listen to this song, but
remember, I'm the.
For Nas to say
"my pen is extreme,"
again, hip hop was built off of
competition, so, you know,
he didn't come here
to be the number two guy.
It's me letting other MCs
know...
- "I'm a poet."
- Right.
Yeah, absolutely.
I'm a poet, and I'm the best.
In hip hop culture, you have
to feel like you're the best
or nobody else is going to feel
like you're the best.
You have to feel
like you're the best,
but you also have to prove
that you're the best.
"My rhyme, it is a vitamin
held without a capsule."
You know, his rhymes go down
easy, they're good for you,
they have nutritious value.
I think ultimately, though,
he's sort of saying
that what he's saying,
people need to hear.
You know,
my life when I was a kid,
I loved it, you know?
That's everything,
that's when you're a sponge.
That's when your imagination
is being fed and, you know,
you think a lot, you know?
It's a really important part
of your life, your childhood.
You reveal a lot of the
vulnerability of yourself
and of these boys on the street.
The album cover
with the young Nasir Jones
with the Queensbridge Housing
Projects in the background
establishes a nostalgic element
of this piece,
but also the meditation
on black childhood
that he's presenting.
Using the projects
and the kid superimposed
to say the content
that you are about to hear,
the music you're about to hear,
the poetry you're about
to experience.
Very literal.
It's like,
I grew up in this world,
and as a result of it,
this is how I express myself.
And you were, after all,
a boy when you wrote this.
Yeah.
There is an extraordinary
perspective.
In that he sees everything
a little bit, um, differently
at a little bit different
level of depth
than, I would say,
just about anybody else.
What I think of
"N.Y. State of Mind"
as both...
operating on two levels.
It's at autobiographical
and allegorical.
And we see Nas kind of operating
on these two planes.
If we put this, like, song
in the kind of great tradition
of New York songs.
There's the Billy Joel
"New York State of Mind,"
which is very different
than Nas's,
so there's that in the
background and backdrop.
It's a reference to Billy Joel,
and, like,
kind of the great songs
of New York,
but from a very different lens.
A kind of much more nostalgic,
but also
maybe more romantic vision
of New York.
In those housing projects,
both his brother
and his best friend were shot,
and his best friend was killed
when he was 14 years old.
Living in that criminal,
kind of, very hard life aspect,
parallel to hell.
But I...
He's bringing us back
to Queensbridge
and into his childhood
on one hand, and yet,
he's using that experience
to kind of create a tapestry
of what American life
looked like,
black American life,
black urban American life
looks like in the late '80s,
early '90s.
But then he's also an artist
telling a story of what that is,
so he's both in it
and then he's above it.
"Lead was hittin' niggas,
one ran, I made him backflip."
So it's, like, he's...
his storytelling was amazing
right there,
like you can actually picture
everything he's saying.
And I hear in those lines
the kind of desperation...
Yeah.
- ...and the adrenaline.
- Right.
- But also a kind of fantasy,
you know, a fantasy life
that you're a cheetah,
that, you know,
you made somebody backflip.
This doesn't just feel
like a poem or a song,
there's a whole choreography
we're watching,
it feels like a movie.
Exactly. It's such a movie!
Heard it click,
I ran like a cheetah,
picked the MAC up,
told brothers, "Back up!"
The MAC spit.
Heard a few chicks scream,
my arm shook, couldn't look.
Gave another squeeze,
heard it click.
My is stuck.
I try to shoot it, it wouldn't
shoot, now I'm in danger.
I pulled it back,
there were three bullets
jammed up in the chamber.
You see it.
Now he's telling the story
and you see it.
So, your greatest fear
is that this weapon
that you tested when you
bought it,
would jam on you.
When the gun is stuck,
and he couldn't look.
Like, you know what that is,
he's a little kid,
he's doing something
and he can't look at it,
he can't look and squeeze,
he's showing that he's not
this guy,
but he's doing something...
he's a product
of his environment.
You don't know how good
it works, teenager,
doesn't know anything about it,
just know I need
one of these things.
He rhymes about getting in
this shootout
and he runs into the lobby,
and he says, you know,
the children probably couldn't
even see as high as I be.
And there's two things
going on there.
One, he was probably high,
you know, smokin' weed,
so the children couldn't see
as high as I be,
because of their innocence.
But also because
he's a little bit older,
this violence is going on
from of young children
who can't understand it.
His whole tone changes when
he hits that line, so he's...
it's the highest adrenaline
point imaginable,
and then a moment of reflection.
Here he is, an assassin,
and then all of a sudden,
there's little kids.
And guess what,
they're in the game, too.
The word "children" there just
sort of tore... tore my heart.
It was very necessary
for me to use "children."
- Mm-hmm.
- They're important.
I see them, they're there,
they were me at one time.
They run up on us
You know,
when he's talking about,
you know, shootouts and talking
about people addicted to drugs,
it's not... it's not like
he's glorifying it,
but he's saying, "Hey,
look at what's happening here."
Like, this is a tragedy.
He's not the only one
that grew up
around violence and drugs.
He's not saying
I'm any different,
this is the circumstance.
This is what everyone's doing.
This is what young kids
are growing up in.
And the truth of the matter is
Queensbridge is Cabrini-Greens,
which is Marcy Projects,
which is Compton,
which is Liberty City,
which is the Fifth Ward.
Like, these circumstances,
this story transfers
to all these ghettos
all around the country,
so they all identified
with this story,
'cause this was the byproduct
of what took place
when you put drugs
in these areas.
It got down to children.
I'm telling you
what I'm seeing, or saw,
and then you know that
they should not be me,
they should not be the narrator
when they grow up.
And they don't have a choice.
Large niggas erasin'
The line that leads us
into the chorus,
"I think of crime when I'm in
a New York state of mind."
So, you know,
on a literal level,
the entire song,
or the entire poem,
describes a kind of criminality
that exists
within the environs
of his world.
But then also, I think,
this is where the kind of
critique comes in.
So who are the real criminals?
Are the real criminals
the people who are
peddling drugs
in their community,
or are the criminals
a kind of state,
like a surveilling state
that allows these drugs
to come into their community
in the first place.
So I think the word
"crime" itself, there,
operates on multiple levels.
But the phrase "I think of..."
"I think of crime,"
which could mean,
I have a great idea,
let's go commit a crime,
"I think of."
But also I meditate on crime,
I see the impact of crime.
Nas gives us
a particular insight
into the kind of underbelly,
or the underworld of New York,
and then lifts that up
to be the way that which
we should understand
how many people exist
as part of the landscape,
but also are victims
of economic injustice
or racial injustice.
The line "I never sleep, 'cause
sleep is the cousin of death,"
sealed him as great,
off the top.
One of the greatest lines
in hip hop history,
one of the greatest lyrics.
When people heard that line,
they would walk around
mesmerized.
No one could understand
how someone could put
a line that deep, that poetic,
that smart and intelligent
inside of a rap song.
So, "sleep is the cousin
of death," he don't wanna sleep,
maybe he don't wanna sleep
'cause he don't wanna miss
anything.
He's trying to be successful,
so he don't want to miss
an opportunity,
so he doesn't want to go
to sleep.
And, you know, where he grew up,
you sort of had to know...
You had to be aware, you had
to always be on lookout,
you had to sleep
with one eye open, in a sense.
You never want to get caught
sleepin',
especially in Queensbridge.
You know, you never want to be
caught not paying attention.
If you are caught sleeping,
if you are caught not aware
and not on point, in a sense,
then death was right around
the corner.
NAS and MC:
NAS and MC:
You know, one of
the things that's very...
that's completely unique
about Nas
is his perception of the world.
You know, he's an artist,
in part,
because of his, you know,
perception and talent
and depth and intellect,
and partly because of his origin
and the circumstances
that he came up through.
Hip hop becomes the vehicle
for him to, in some ways,
outrun the circumstances
that he's born into.
So today, you know,
thank God I'm here.
I made it through the storm.
There's a very healthy future
for hip hop music in America.
They're starting to want to see
other American stories,
other than just one story,
so this one,
I hope it opens up that lane.
This thing we're doing,
I hope it opens that up
so that every story's told,
everyone can be inspired
and then be uplifted.
We give you the real, so, as
long as real means something,
hip hop will mean something.
is rated TV-MA.
It contains language
that may not be suitable
for all audiences.
Viewer discretion is advised.
As I think about this kid
who wrote this when he was 17,
and I don't know how.
I just don't understand how.
He was about 20 years old
when the album was released,
so a lot of this
is coming of age, as a man,
I'm starting to understand
the world around me.
We should also think of him
as a musical, poetic prodigy,
that we see this
black boy genius
who has this
workman-like quality,
and lyrical precision and beauty
articulating all of that
in one song.
He's impeccable with words.
The way he puts his wordplay,
it's like a dance that he does.
Probably the most visual
storyteller,
you know, maybe ever in rap.
She'll bring you customers
I think Nas
is one of the greatest poets
not only hip hop has seen
but music has seen.
MC and NAS:
MC and NAS:
In 2002, Harvard University
opened the doors of the world's
first academic hip hop archive.
The archive's mission:
to provide an institutional home
for an artform
and cultural movement that had,
over the last 20 years,
achieved global importance.
In the fall of 2013,
when the Archive's
first research fellowship
was established,
it was named for Nasir Jones,
whose pioneering album,
Illmatic,
was just then being reissued in
a 20-year anniversary edition.
Visibly moved by the occasion,
Nas accepted the honor on behalf
of friends who had not survived,
and he offered tribute
to hip hop, the young art form
that gave scope
to his own talent.
Ask hip hop-heads,
and what they'll say is
it was Nas' artistry
that made rap an art form.
And so, Nas's technique
was where I started
when I spoke to him
after the Harvard ceremony,
and then a few months later
in L.A.
And his technique
was the first topic
of my conversation
with scholar Salamishah Tillet,
and then with a group
of Nas' friends and fans
who met me to discuss his work
at the headquarters of Genius,
a website for the analysis
and annotation
of musical and verbal texts,
including hip hop.
"Musician,
inflictin' composition of pain,
I'm like Scarface, sniffin'
cocaine, holdin' an M16,
see with the pen I'm extreme."
"Rappers, I monkey flip 'em,
"with the funky rhythm
I be kickin'."
That's a lot, just fitting
so many rhymes into, you know,
into the verse.
He's packing so much
in this piece.
And each word,
each line has a precision.
The same joy that you get
from saying, you know,
"Peter Piper picked a pepper."
You know what I'm saying?
It's the alliteration,
it's the repetition of sounds.
Well, his technical skill
was breakthrough at the time.
You know, there's internal
rhyme structure, too,
and, you know, the rhymes were
just kind of the last syllable,
and now he's doing this
two or three or four times
within two weeks, you know.
Any way he can,
he's inflicting the composition
of pain with the pen,
like, they don't know
how to take it.
He's so eloquent
with his wordplay
and with the words he choose
to use.
You're a rapper,
what do you mean "composition"?
How do put rapper in...
like, no one,
up to that point in time,
no one was actually looking
at the words and equating it to
art, or equating it to poetry.
How did he put these words
together
as a kid who didn't even
graduate high school?
How did he do that?
There's a language
of the subculture.
You know, certain neighborhoods,
spin... spin the words around
a lot different than others.
Italians say different things,
Irish say different things.
Jamaicans, forget about it.
They got a whole different way
of spinning words around, and...
That spinning words
as though it's a record.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So, I talk from that point
of view,
that-that language around
my neighborhood
that everybody uses.
Langston Hughes would say
"a river of language,"
that you... the language of
a neighborhood or a subculture,
and that you are honoring
the poetics
that exist in these
neighborhoods.
Yeah.
I'm a disciple of the streets.
Like, this is... the streets
is my world, it's everything.
And I'm from it.
I'm of it, I love it.
Was there a moment,
a different moment,
a moment with you thinking about
your own words?
It had to start
at a really early age for me.
You were eight or nine?
Seven, eight.
And you started to love
the sound of words.
You know, the first things that
get cut in the school system
are the music programs, right?
So, kids in New York
aren't learning
how to play instruments, right?
So how do they
express themselves?
They get their mother's
and father's disco records
and two turntables,
and they cut between
the beat break,
which is the part of the song
where it's just a drum break
with no words.
And you would cut
back and forth,
and you would extend that
for several minutes
so you can rhyme over
a part of the song
that didn't have words on it.
So Nas says, "I'm the smooth
criminal on beat breaks."
I noticed the power in poetry
through rap music
when I was a kid.
There was a guy named T La Rock,
and he made a song called
"It's Yours."
"Commentating, illustrating,
description giving, adjectives."
He was saying words
like a teacher would say,
but there was a rhythm to it
and the track,
the beat underneath of it
was hard,
and it was like he created
these visuals in my head,
and I said,
"This guy is amazing."
It was the very first
time that anyone in the art form
know how to put words together
that gave you specific,
specific, granular details
that had that level of texture.
"Bullet holes left
in my peepholes."
And so there, there's obviously
the double entendre
of peepholes being his people.
He's kind of meditating
or marking the everyday-ness
of black death, right?
Is there also, perhaps,
the door?
A peephole that people
shoot through.
Exactly.
There was a lot of incidents
where if you had a problem
with someone, they might...
They can't find you,
they might come to your door
and shoot through your peephole.
I mean, that was on the news
back then.
What else could peepholes be?
And then peepholes
being his...
what he's providing us, right?
He's a... he's the...
both muse, but the seer.
He's giving us a kind of insight
into this community.
The letter "I".
The letter "I".
Optical.
Yeah, optical or also,
the surveilling eye.
There's, you know,
there's a number of eyes
that I think are operating here.
...is like a maze
in all the stories
Peoples come back black
He compares the blocks to a maze
full of black rats trapped.
Which is interesting,
because the infrastructure
of Queensbridge looks,
from the top, like a maze.
You know, everybody's stacked
on top of each other there.
I don't even think
they picked up garbage
three times a week in New York
like they do now.
You know,
so you saw rats on the street,
and it really felt like a maze.
And, you know, when he says
"the Island is packed,"
he's, of course,
referring to Riker's Island.
At least a parallel to slavery
and a parallel to basically
being trapped in a life
and in a world
that you can't get out of.
Scarfacewas a
super influential film
among rappers in particular,
but, you know,
among everybody,
I think of that generation.
I mean,
that movie came out in 1983,
so by the time Nas
gets to writing his songs,
I bet he saw Scarface
several times, you know,
as a kid,
and started making the parallels
of what he saw
on that movie screen
and what was going on
in his neighborhood.
Visualizing himself
sort of in that, you know,
iconic movie role.
I guess back in the day,
when people were having
these critiques of hip hop
being so violent,
someone would misread that line
as him endorsing
a kind of hyper-violence.
Him saying
"with the pen I'm extreme"
I think sort of nods to
with the pen,
he becomes larger than life.
He can be Scarface with a pen.
I'm not saying like I want
to go and hurt somebody.
No, no.
- I'm just telling you
like how slick I am,
and it does go back to the pen,
but it's like
I'm just telling you I'm slick,
I can say things
that you didn't think of,
or I can do things you can't do.
The arsenal that
he's pulling from
is as deep and as heavy
and as strong as an M16.
You need credibility
as an artist, first,
and then for anything
that you say to matter.
He's announcing his arrival,
and then he's also like
dismissing those who,
in any way,
will contest his territory.
That is a description of poetry,
is having a particular
kind of power.
It's like my ID card,
it's like... all right,
listen to this song, but
remember, I'm the.
For Nas to say
"my pen is extreme,"
again, hip hop was built off of
competition, so, you know,
he didn't come here
to be the number two guy.
It's me letting other MCs
know...
- "I'm a poet."
- Right.
Yeah, absolutely.
I'm a poet, and I'm the best.
In hip hop culture, you have
to feel like you're the best
or nobody else is going to feel
like you're the best.
You have to feel
like you're the best,
but you also have to prove
that you're the best.
"My rhyme, it is a vitamin
held without a capsule."
You know, his rhymes go down
easy, they're good for you,
they have nutritious value.
I think ultimately, though,
he's sort of saying
that what he's saying,
people need to hear.
You know,
my life when I was a kid,
I loved it, you know?
That's everything,
that's when you're a sponge.
That's when your imagination
is being fed and, you know,
you think a lot, you know?
It's a really important part
of your life, your childhood.
You reveal a lot of the
vulnerability of yourself
and of these boys on the street.
The album cover
with the young Nasir Jones
with the Queensbridge Housing
Projects in the background
establishes a nostalgic element
of this piece,
but also the meditation
on black childhood
that he's presenting.
Using the projects
and the kid superimposed
to say the content
that you are about to hear,
the music you're about to hear,
the poetry you're about
to experience.
Very literal.
It's like,
I grew up in this world,
and as a result of it,
this is how I express myself.
And you were, after all,
a boy when you wrote this.
Yeah.
There is an extraordinary
perspective.
In that he sees everything
a little bit, um, differently
at a little bit different
level of depth
than, I would say,
just about anybody else.
What I think of
"N.Y. State of Mind"
as both...
operating on two levels.
It's at autobiographical
and allegorical.
And we see Nas kind of operating
on these two planes.
If we put this, like, song
in the kind of great tradition
of New York songs.
There's the Billy Joel
"New York State of Mind,"
which is very different
than Nas's,
so there's that in the
background and backdrop.
It's a reference to Billy Joel,
and, like,
kind of the great songs
of New York,
but from a very different lens.
A kind of much more nostalgic,
but also
maybe more romantic vision
of New York.
In those housing projects,
both his brother
and his best friend were shot,
and his best friend was killed
when he was 14 years old.
Living in that criminal,
kind of, very hard life aspect,
parallel to hell.
But I...
He's bringing us back
to Queensbridge
and into his childhood
on one hand, and yet,
he's using that experience
to kind of create a tapestry
of what American life
looked like,
black American life,
black urban American life
looks like in the late '80s,
early '90s.
But then he's also an artist
telling a story of what that is,
so he's both in it
and then he's above it.
"Lead was hittin' niggas,
one ran, I made him backflip."
So it's, like, he's...
his storytelling was amazing
right there,
like you can actually picture
everything he's saying.
And I hear in those lines
the kind of desperation...
Yeah.
- ...and the adrenaline.
- Right.
- But also a kind of fantasy,
you know, a fantasy life
that you're a cheetah,
that, you know,
you made somebody backflip.
This doesn't just feel
like a poem or a song,
there's a whole choreography
we're watching,
it feels like a movie.
Exactly. It's such a movie!
Heard it click,
I ran like a cheetah,
picked the MAC up,
told brothers, "Back up!"
The MAC spit.
Heard a few chicks scream,
my arm shook, couldn't look.
Gave another squeeze,
heard it click.
My is stuck.
I try to shoot it, it wouldn't
shoot, now I'm in danger.
I pulled it back,
there were three bullets
jammed up in the chamber.
You see it.
Now he's telling the story
and you see it.
So, your greatest fear
is that this weapon
that you tested when you
bought it,
would jam on you.
When the gun is stuck,
and he couldn't look.
Like, you know what that is,
he's a little kid,
he's doing something
and he can't look at it,
he can't look and squeeze,
he's showing that he's not
this guy,
but he's doing something...
he's a product
of his environment.
You don't know how good
it works, teenager,
doesn't know anything about it,
just know I need
one of these things.
He rhymes about getting in
this shootout
and he runs into the lobby,
and he says, you know,
the children probably couldn't
even see as high as I be.
And there's two things
going on there.
One, he was probably high,
you know, smokin' weed,
so the children couldn't see
as high as I be,
because of their innocence.
But also because
he's a little bit older,
this violence is going on
from of young children
who can't understand it.
His whole tone changes when
he hits that line, so he's...
it's the highest adrenaline
point imaginable,
and then a moment of reflection.
Here he is, an assassin,
and then all of a sudden,
there's little kids.
And guess what,
they're in the game, too.
The word "children" there just
sort of tore... tore my heart.
It was very necessary
for me to use "children."
- Mm-hmm.
- They're important.
I see them, they're there,
they were me at one time.
They run up on us
You know,
when he's talking about,
you know, shootouts and talking
about people addicted to drugs,
it's not... it's not like
he's glorifying it,
but he's saying, "Hey,
look at what's happening here."
Like, this is a tragedy.
He's not the only one
that grew up
around violence and drugs.
He's not saying
I'm any different,
this is the circumstance.
This is what everyone's doing.
This is what young kids
are growing up in.
And the truth of the matter is
Queensbridge is Cabrini-Greens,
which is Marcy Projects,
which is Compton,
which is Liberty City,
which is the Fifth Ward.
Like, these circumstances,
this story transfers
to all these ghettos
all around the country,
so they all identified
with this story,
'cause this was the byproduct
of what took place
when you put drugs
in these areas.
It got down to children.
I'm telling you
what I'm seeing, or saw,
and then you know that
they should not be me,
they should not be the narrator
when they grow up.
And they don't have a choice.
Large niggas erasin'
The line that leads us
into the chorus,
"I think of crime when I'm in
a New York state of mind."
So, you know,
on a literal level,
the entire song,
or the entire poem,
describes a kind of criminality
that exists
within the environs
of his world.
But then also, I think,
this is where the kind of
critique comes in.
So who are the real criminals?
Are the real criminals
the people who are
peddling drugs
in their community,
or are the criminals
a kind of state,
like a surveilling state
that allows these drugs
to come into their community
in the first place.
So I think the word
"crime" itself, there,
operates on multiple levels.
But the phrase "I think of..."
"I think of crime,"
which could mean,
I have a great idea,
let's go commit a crime,
"I think of."
But also I meditate on crime,
I see the impact of crime.
Nas gives us
a particular insight
into the kind of underbelly,
or the underworld of New York,
and then lifts that up
to be the way that which
we should understand
how many people exist
as part of the landscape,
but also are victims
of economic injustice
or racial injustice.
The line "I never sleep, 'cause
sleep is the cousin of death,"
sealed him as great,
off the top.
One of the greatest lines
in hip hop history,
one of the greatest lyrics.
When people heard that line,
they would walk around
mesmerized.
No one could understand
how someone could put
a line that deep, that poetic,
that smart and intelligent
inside of a rap song.
So, "sleep is the cousin
of death," he don't wanna sleep,
maybe he don't wanna sleep
'cause he don't wanna miss
anything.
He's trying to be successful,
so he don't want to miss
an opportunity,
so he doesn't want to go
to sleep.
And, you know, where he grew up,
you sort of had to know...
You had to be aware, you had
to always be on lookout,
you had to sleep
with one eye open, in a sense.
You never want to get caught
sleepin',
especially in Queensbridge.
You know, you never want to be
caught not paying attention.
If you are caught sleeping,
if you are caught not aware
and not on point, in a sense,
then death was right around
the corner.
NAS and MC:
NAS and MC:
You know, one of
the things that's very...
that's completely unique
about Nas
is his perception of the world.
You know, he's an artist,
in part,
because of his, you know,
perception and talent
and depth and intellect,
and partly because of his origin
and the circumstances
that he came up through.
Hip hop becomes the vehicle
for him to, in some ways,
outrun the circumstances
that he's born into.
So today, you know,
thank God I'm here.
I made it through the storm.
There's a very healthy future
for hip hop music in America.
They're starting to want to see
other American stories,
other than just one story,
so this one,
I hope it opens up that lane.
This thing we're doing,
I hope it opens that up
so that every story's told,
everyone can be inspired
and then be uplifted.
We give you the real, so, as
long as real means something,
hip hop will mean something.