Free falling

What Nas is like

by Alex Pappademas

Two Nas projects hit the racks this month: the Queens-bred rapper's third album, I Am . . . (Columbia), and the video of his screen acting debut, the Mean-Streets-meets-Fantasia crime drama Belly. Despite its less-than-stellar box-office hang time and from-reserved-to-dismal reviews, Belly I can recommend. Sure, it was a big-screen infomercial for its all-rap-star cast -- what else could we expect from writer/director Hype Williams, who's best known for turning hip-hop videos into psychedelic, mythmaking Viewmasters and lensing the Gap's "Khaki Soul" spot? The film's sober Harlem Armory climax can't undo the spell cast by the 90 minutes of visual indulgence that precedes it -- aided by He Got Game cinematographer Malik Hasaan Sayeed, Williams spent most of Belly lingering with blunted tunnel vision on everyday images rendered arrestingly ill. Luxury cars gleam like flying saucers; a Kingston hoochie dancer's jiggling behind develops a hypnotic, hydraulic life of its own. And yeah, the way the film grooves on violence (gunfights filmed in jerky, hyper-real Saving Private Ryan strobe-o-vision) makes its redemption-through-brotherhood ending feel disingenuous.

You can't blame people for missing the message, but at least Belly has one. In contrast, I Am . . . catches a once-stunning MC in artistic freefall, bitching and BSing as befits hip-hop's quintessential squandered-talent poster child. If that sounds unnecessarily harsh, go back and listen to the old stuff again. On "Live at the Barbecue," the seminal Main Source posse cut that introduced Nas to the world, teenage "Nasty Nas" spit one provocation after another -- lines like "When I was 12, I went to hell for snuffin' Jesus" and "Iller than a AIDS patient" figured prominently in the bad-boy blueprints to Eminem's heavily Nas-schooled first album, though even Slim Shady wouldn't go near a boast like "Hangin' niggas like the Ku Klux Klan." On 1994's Illmatic (Columbia), over beats provided by Main Source's Large Professor, Pete Rock, and Gang Starr's DJ Premier, Nas came off boastful and soulful, a roof-jumping jazzman's kid with a heart that rattled like a project window, sparking blunts on a park bench to hold back the dark.

It was a great album. And Premier, who returns to produce two cuts on I Am . . . , deftly draws his reference points from it. "N.Y. State of Mind Pt. II" is a self-explanatory sequel; "Nas Is Like" -- the most compellingly synesthetic moment on the new disc -- scratches together fragments from Illmatic's "It Ain't Hard To Tell." Pulsing with looped harps and goofily percussive chirping-bird SFX, lyrically skimpy but conceptually bold, "Nas Is Like" is a breathless ransom note for (or from) the ghosts of Nas past.

When Nas does manage to gather his thoughts and flex his oft-referenced, under-utilized novelistic gifts, the result feels like a consolation prize. The excellent "Small World" is a coked-out Abel Ferarra flick on wax that recalls Raekwon's Only Built 4 Cuban Linx (still the best Wu-Tang solo joint, and the pinnacle of East Coast Mafioso-core hip-hop). And "We Will Survive" is a hackneyed shout-out to Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls phoned in over a Kenny Loggins sample -- like Tupac's more tender "Changes," which samples Bruce Hornsby, it's an attempt to rationalize the hard-knock life with a soft-rock swipe, only Nas's tender Pac/B.I.G. memories just sound like celebrity gossip. But then there's that third verse, indicting the ludicrousness of rap-world violence ("I wonder what the Commodores went through on tour?/Did Smokey Robinson have to shoot his way outta war?/What has Al Green seen that made him religious?"), then painting itself into a corner no less painful for its familiarity ("Nothing left for us but hoop dreams and hood tournaments . . . Either that or rap/We want the fast way outta this trap/Whether it be 9 to 5 or slangin' crack").

Minus those flickers, I Am . . . is a fuzzy-minded wasteland. The B-side on the "Nas Is Like" 12-inch is a puerile sex-ed rap called "Dr. Knockboots" -- Nas warns us not to mess around with the nasty ho's (yo, thanks!) and always to ID those pesky underage groupies. I'll stick with Dr. Octagon. On "Hate Me Now," Nas trots out hip-hop's tiredest logical fallacy -- the myth of the jealous, Benz-keying, bad-record-review-scribbling playa-hater -- with help from Sean "Puffy" Combs and some ludicrous movie-trailer orchestration. A bad-attitude anthem for sore winners, "Hate Me" sounds 10 times as dumb coming from Nas, who (apparently) has yet to realize that his critics are voicing disappointment, not envy.

In other words, the people with the harshest words for Nas are former Nas fans. And can you blame us? When Nas goes to talk to "The mayor, to the governor, to the muthafuckin' President" on "I Want To Talk to You," all he gives us is the same computer-paranoid, Playstation/space-station Y2K jive as Busta Rhymes -- only Busta spits that woo-hah with tongue in cheek. Coming from a "real" New York MC in the year of Diallo, that's not just a letdown, it's practically a betrayal. Something even Nas diehards should be used to by now.