conflcted

7/23/2019 conflcted

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/conflcted 1/12

This article was downloaded by: [187.156.37.211]On: 12 April 2014, At: 18:59Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Journal of Poetry Therapy: The

Interdisciplinary Journal of Practice,

Theory, Research and EducationPublication details, including instructions for authors and

subscription information:

http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tjpt20

Conflicted state of mind: Race,

masculinity, and Nas's lyric public

pedagogyTyler J. Pollard

Published online: 02 Jan 2014.

To cite this article: Tyler J. Pollard (2014) Conflicted state of mind: Race, masculinity, and Nas's

lyric public pedagogy, Journal of Poetry Therapy: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Practice, Theory,

Research and Education, 27:1, 1-11, DOI: 10.1080/08893675.2014.871807

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08893675.2014.871807

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,

and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever orhowsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arisingout of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-

and-conditions


http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08893675.2014.871807

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/showCitFormats?doi=10.1080/08893675.2014.871807


7/23/2019 conflcted


Conflicted state of mind: Race,masculinity, and Nas’s lyric publicpedagogy

Tyler J. Pollard*

(Received 31 January 2013; accepted 10 October 2013)

Contemporary music scholar Mark Anthony Neal suggests Antonio Gramsci ’s notion of the “organic

intellectual ” is particularly suited for thinking about the hip-hop artist as a black public intellectual. I

follow Neal in making a case for conceiving of popular rap artist Nas as a public pedagogical figure —

an organic and imaginative thinker with the power to move between individuals ’ private troubles

and larger public issues. While other critics have considered some of the ways in which Nas’ s lyrics are

critical, self-reflexive, and even pedagogical, this paper focuses on Nas’ s representation of masculinity

as a site that highlights the ways in which the complexities and ambivalences of his lyrics and music

are precisely what enable him to act as a pedagogical figure both uniquely attuned to his audience’ s

concerns and armed with the “ street cred ” to challenge its expectations. This paper carefully unpacks

Nas’ s “ One Love,

” and the lesser known “ Poppa was a Playa

” in order to illustrate the degree to

which popular hip-hop has the potential to act as a critical and public pedagogic counterpoint to other

mainstream and problematically hyper-masculine male rappers.

Keywords Education; fatherhood; hip-hop; masculinity; pedagogy; race; storytelling

Contemporary music scholars Mark Anthony Neal (1999, 2010) and Marc Lamont

Hill (2010) have taken up Antonio Gramsci’s notion of the “organic intellectual”—an

intellectual who arises not from the academy but from within the spaces of culture — as

particularly suited for understanding the role of the hip-hop artist as a black public

intellectual. I want to follow Hill (2010) in making a case for conceiving of popular rap

artist Nas as a public pedagogical figure — an organic and imaginative thinker with the

power to translate individuals’ private troubles into public issues (see Mills, 1959, on the

importance of this move from private troubles to public issues). While other critics

have considered some of the ways in which Nas’s music is critical, self-reflexive, and

even pedagogical, I want to focus on Nas’s representation of masculinity as a site that

highlights the ways in which the complexities and ambivalences of his lyrics and music

*Corresponding author. Tyler J. Pollard, McMaster University, Department of English and CulturalStudies, 1280 Main St W, Hamilton, ON L8S 4L8, Canada. Tel: (647) 880-2477. Email: tylerjpollard@

gmail.com

Journal of Poetry Therapy, 2014Vol. 27, No. 1, 1 – 11, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08893675.2014.871807

© 2013 National Association for Poetry Therapy

mailto:[email protected]


http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08893675.2014.871807

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08893675.2014.871807



7/23/2019 conflcted


are precisely what enable him to act as a pedagogical figure both uniquely attuned to his

audience’s concerns and armed with the “street cred” to challenge its expectations. It is

Nas’s performatively vulnerable yet hard masculine state of mind that creates the

conditions for an imaginative and transformative pedagogy, capable of shifting

perspectives from the personal and psychological to the social and political. More

specifically, Nas explores both the complexities of the black father – son relationship

and the possibilities of a responsible father-like pedagogy in sketching out alternatives

to the more stereotypical masculine positions frequently found in rap and hip-hop. In

this paper, I will carefully unpack the lyrics and music of Nas ’s (1994b) “One Love,”

and (2002) “Poppa was a Playa,” in order to illustrate the ways in which Nas models a

popular yet responsible masculinity and acts as a critical and public pedagogic

counterpoint to other mainstream and problematically hyper-masculine male

rappers.1

Nas is an important artist to discuss for several reasons. Not only have nearly all of

his albums over the past 16 years reached platinum status, but his fan base, as Hill(2010) states, is predominantly urban blacks (pp. 106–107). Thus, while there are a

number of contemporary socially conscious hip-hop artists and groups, for example,

Dead Prez, Immortal Technique, Common, Talib Kweli, and Mos Def, none of these

artists have the fan base and thus the public attention that Nas does. Nas has the ear of

millions of individuals affected by the very social ills and inequalities that he raps

about. Further, his lasting success demonstrates that his listeners care about what he

has to say. Nas is an example of what Neal (2010) calls a “celebrity Gramscian”; that

is, an organic intellectual of the people who uses his or her celebrity status as a platform

to speak truth about political and social matters (p. 107). If the academic public

intellectual negotiates the tensions that arise between the differing demands and

expectations of the academy and the public, the “celebrity Gramscian” hip-hop artist

grapples with the divide between so-called commercial and conscious hip-hop music.

The terms “conscious” and “commercial” are used to distinguish between rappers

that are supposedly more politically and artistically courageous and complex and those

whose music is aimed solely at popular success. However, as Hill (2010) points out,

this distinction does not really work because it is too generalizing (pp. 98 – 99). More

specifically, in Nas’s case, the two become entwined it becomes difficult to align him

with one or the other (Hill, 2010, p. 100). It is precisely this “fluid” position that gives

Nas the ability to speak to a large audience about important issues, yet which finds himcaught between conflicting tendencies (Hill, 2010, p. 100). Hill notes that while Nas

has some highly political songs, those lyrical narratives in which he functions as “an

informal ethnographer” are more effective modes of public pedagogy (Hill, 2010, p.

107). For example, Nas’s newest album (2008), “Untitled”— so-named due to the

corporate censorship of the original title, “Nigger”— contains many overtly political

songs, including “America,” “N.I.G.G.E.R.,” and “Project Roach.” However, what

this album lacks is the kind of serious but subtle engagement with what it means to a

black male in a culture that so overdetermines black masculinity and which is found in

earlier, more ambivalent tracks.

Nas’s conflicting tendencies as both “conscious” and “commercial” artist are

particularly apparent in his frequent flaunting of the iconic signs of a “gangsta’s”

2 T. J. Pollard

7/23/2019 conflcted


success—bling — which work to fetishize consumerism. Similarly, Nas often romanti-

cizes what James Braxton Peterson (2010) calls “the critical architecture of popular

hip-hop worldviews”: the “come-up narrative,” or hip-hop’s version of “rags-to-

riches” (pp. 76 – 77). As Nas (1994a) explains in the track “Life’s a Bitch”: people are

respected for having money, and for that reason are oriented toward making it, in

whatever way. Nevertheless, one need be careful with such generalizations, as in

another song about the so-called “gangsta life,” Nas talks about problems associated

with having money but not being happy of having — this is something he says he

would not wish on anybody. Another problematic tendency in Nas’s music, as Kyra

D. Gaunt (2010) argues, is his occasionally patriarchal and even startlingly

misogynist music, of which “The Makings of a Perfect Bitch” is a perfect example.

While it may seem a little too convenient in uncomfortable cases as these to remind

ourselves (as Gaunt, 2010 herself does) of the impact of corporate pressures on hip-

hop, it is, nevertheless, the case that record labels, at least in part, shape this music. If

Nas (2006) himself said in “Can’t Forget About You

” that crime more than creativity

sells records, in his latest album (released end of 2008), he has spoken out more

vehemently against the music industry, claiming in the track “Hero” that he is stuck

in a kind of musical or sonic prison because of corporate censorship. In any case, it is

precisely because he has “been able to stay ‘true’ to the game of black masculinity

and Western patriarchal dominance without ever being forced to choose” that, as

Gaunt (2010) contends, Nas “is a perfect candidate for exploring gender issues

within hip-hop” (p. 154).

If consumerism and narrow gender roles are part of the very fabric of popular

rap music, one of the ways Nas works to contest the prescripted boundaries of the

genre is by complicating and expanding the grammar of what it means to be a black

man immersed in the “gangsta” world of hip-hop culture. In The Hip Hop Wars,

Tricia Rose (2008) argues against frequent defenses of hip-hop which claim the

music is merely reflecting the reality of inner-city life, and hence, cannot be criticized

for the violent imagery it keeps in circulation (p. 138). Rose (2008) stresses that not

only are such representations often promoted by corporate influence, they are limited

and stereotyped representations of black life and black culture that reinforce

negative, racist images of black people (p. 138). More importantly, Rose (2008)

insists, these representations are also skewed insofar as they tend to glamorize and

mythologize a violent lifestyle in which every man is a thug, hustler, gangsta, or pimp,rather than individuals suffering from homelessness, a war on the poor, intergenera-

tional drug addiction, daily fear for one’s life, and from the terrible experiences that

accompany incarceration (p. 139).

In this context, Nas’s “One Love” offers a welcome counter to the consumption

of glorified images of street life in its focus on the lives damaged by an incarceration

binge voracious for black bodies and the violence and drugs that are part of a history

of social starvation in black neighborhoods. “One Love” is a three-verse lyrical letter

to the speaker’s imprisoned “homeboys” that combines detailed reportage of the

happenings of their friends and family with a bleak meditation on the devastatingeffects of urban violence and poverty. Michael Eric Dyson (2010) rightly situates this

track within the context of a growing prison-industrial-complex, which now sees

Lyric public pedagogy 3

7/23/2019 conflcted


2.3 million Americans incarcerated, 50% of which are black in a country where

blacks comprise only 12% of the population. Currently 1 in 106 young white males

are behind bars, whereas a startling 1 in 9 young black males share a similar fate

(Dyson, 2010, p. 131). As Dyson (2010) suggests, “One Love” captures what Sohail

Daulatzai has called the “incarceral imagination” and to a certain extent, coura-

geously explores “poignant moments of black male intimacy and vulnerability forged

in the crucible of urban desperation and poverty ” (p. 133). However, if Rose (2008)

criticizes hip-hop as a whole for glamorizing the tough “thug” lifestyle, Dyson (2010)

somewhat overstates the tender tones of the song’s expression of brotherly love and

the degree to which Nas directly links specific fates to larger systemic problems. I

want to argue for a more complicated and nuanced reading of the song, one that

takes the lyrical and musical elements into consideration and the ways in which Nas

configures the poor, black, masculine “state of mind” as torn between what Tupac

famously called a “thug mentality ”—a tough, angry, confrontational exterior—and a

vulnerable, openly distressed self-reflexivity.I want to begin by considering the music of “One Love.” Reading Michael Eric

Dyson’s (2010) discussion of the way in which “the creative force of love and

intimacy [between brothers] weaves throughout Nas’s sonic epistle and transcends

the boundaries of mere reportage, ascending to elegy and exhortation” (p. 135)

would lead one to expect a more overtly emotional musical track with a clearer sense

of dramatic progression. Thus it is all the more important, I contend, to begin an

examination of the song with an analysis of a musical track that contrasts so clearly

with the affective cadence of Dyson’s (2010) moving rhetoric. Rapper and producer

Q-Tip produced the music for the song, using a sampled drum track from “Come in

Out of the Rain” by Parliament—featured on its own in the song’s opening sequence

which “overhears” the voices of imprisoned men—and a sample from the soul jazz

classic by the Heath Brothers, “Smiling Billy Suite, Part II” (Dyson, 2010, p. 134).

The latter sample gives the song its dominant sound and the low, detached plucking

of the double-bass together with the hollow tone of the Mbira thumb piano, an

African wooden finger xylophone, produce a cool, minimalist esthetic. The song’s

musical track forms a basic two-part phrase, which is repeated in a loop throughout

the song, with no variation save occasional silences, reinforcing the minimalist feel.

Due to the modal (nonmajor or minor) harmonies of the Heath Brothers’ sample,

the kinds of dramatic tensions and releases created by key harmonic functions intraditional Western music are noticeably absent. As a result, the sample creates a

sense of static unrest, and this is amplified by the segmented, repetitive, cyclical, and

occasionally interrupted structure of the track. I suggest that the music works to

reflect the sense of restless confinement and psychic tension and ambivalence, which,

as I will shortly discuss, the lyrics address more directly. The repeated internal

rhymes of the lyrics do, as Dyson (2010) suggests, add a sense of “repetition” and

urgency to the words; however, the sense of “impatience” this rhyme scheme lends to

the lyrics is heightened by the static foil of the musical track.

While the music provides an indispensable sonic counterpart to the themes of the song, the lyrics shed a more specific light on its pedagogy. The first verse opens

with Nas informing an unnamed friend of the birth of his son, of his “lady ’s”

4 T. J. Pollard

7/23/2019 conflcted


frustration about his incarceration, and of her betrayal of him with members of a rival

crew—an infidelity to which Nas gives added weight with internal rhyme. Nas goes

on to describe how nighttime is bringing more trouble than ever in the neighborhood

and notes the random death of a friend’s niece and how little boys they know are

turning into “young thugs,” selling drugs and carrying guns. The growing toughness

demanded of these youth is echoed in Nas’s injunction to his friend to “hold the fort

down” with other imprisoned crew members. The verse ends with an expression of

brotherly loyalty that also functions as the song’s echoing refrain: “one love.”

The second verse or letter, to “Born,” describes the repetitiveness of everyday

existence on the street—drug dealers, crack heads, and loudmouths—as well as how

Born’s friend has been backstabbing him by fraternizing with his enemy. He also

informs Born of his brother’s legal troubles and impending incarceration. Noting

that he heard Born had attacked another inmate with a razor blade over phone

privileges and earlier had been the target of an attempted rape in the showers, Nas

cautions Born to “maintain” and to stay “civilized.” In addition to portraying thebodily assaults faced by inmates—something which, according to Rose (2008, p.

139), is rare—Nas also recognizes the psychological effects of being locked up—the

ways in which your mind starts to die in prison—as well as the toll Born’s

imprisonment is taking on his grieving mother. Nas implicitly acknowledges the

far-reaching impact of the prison-industrial complex, later stating that a future in

prison is bleak. Here he voices his distress only indirectly by referring to the crying of

Born’s mother—and immediately armors himself in the more conventionally

“masculine” emotional expression of anger, hatred, and the desire to murder.

The third verse is both the most critical, self-reflexive, and explicitly pedago-

gical. It opens with an expression of frustration: relaxing and getting high, Nas

frustratingly ponders the gaps that exist between the “facts” of life he sees all around

him and the so-called facts that are taught to young people in textbooks and in

classrooms. This frustration can be understood both as a commentary on the

immense gap separating the “facts” found in schoolbooks and the “facts” of the

street, and, given more explicit discussions of this topic in other songs, such as “I

Can,” “N.I.G.G.E.R. (Master and Slave),” and “America,” as a critique of the

erasure of black history from dominant educational and religious discourses. As

Dyson (2010) notes, Nas is here working within a previously established mode of

hip-hop that “amplifies the black cultural suspicion of, and exclusion from,sanctioned bodies of knowledge and the institutions they are tied to” (p. 142). Nas

decries the lies taught in school, claiming that they get him “vexed-er.” Nas

deliberately adopts a grammatically incorrect suffix as a superlative to flout the

privileged, implicitly white, cultural capital metonymically represented in the song by

the rules of grammar. Progressive educational critics have long decried the way in

which standardized curricula and testing reductively view the black vernacular as

merely a devolution of the proper white vernacular, rather than recognizing its

potential to function as a performative speech act that contests “white” standards of

intelligence. It is telling, therefore, that Nas uses this moment as an occasion fordrawing attention to the kind of linguistic struggle that is inherent, whether or not it

is foregrounded, to rap and hip-hop in general.


7/23/2019 conflcted


In the next nine lines of the song, Nas presents an implicit form of pedagogy that

works by modeling a kind of vulnerable masculinity that counters the invincible,

fearless, and always “cool” mode of “50 cent” masculinity more typical of the genre.

Nas himself displays this kind of tough masculinity and even braggadocio in tracks

such as “Life’s a Bitch,” “The Message,” and “Make the World Go Round.”

According to Imani Perry (2004), “The theatre of hardness in hip hop provides

instruction about the self-protective strategies that young Black urban men adopt,

which are a response to, rather than a cause of, the critical situation they face”

(p. 167). Nas works within this “theatre” to create a tutelary space for addressing

ways of being defensive in the more conventional masculine mode, as well as

vulnerable, yet, nevertheless, safe from accusations of effeminacy. Here, and in tracks

like “Hold Down the Bloc,” Nas exhibits an emotionally permeable and even

psychologically damageable position. He talks about the near unbearable stress that

was caused by life on the streets and about how selling drugs on the corners

inevitably leads to prison. If in previous verses, Nas hastened to transform “softer”

affects of sadness or regret into “harder” ones of anger and aggression, here he briefly

acknowledges the impact of harsh social conditions of black life as one that breaks

down tough defenses. A few lines later, Nas links this admission of personal trauma

to the communal and familial suffering that results from the violent deaths of too

many young black males, directly undercutting the more typical glamorization of

street life in rap. In an unreleased song with the seemingly paradoxical title “Gangsta

Tears,” featured in the film Exit Wounds, starring rapper DMX, Nas enacts an openly

mourning “gangsta” persona. If Dyson (2010) called “One Love” a “veiled lament of

the illicit lifestyle that snares young lives,” “Gangsta Tears” is a literal elegy that askswhy so many young black makes have to end up dead (p. 141).

In the last half of the final verse Nas recounts an explicit pedagogical encounter.

On returning to the projects after being a “ghost” for a few days, Nas meets “Shorty,” a

twelve-year-old boy sporting a bulletproof vest and a .32 caliber pistol, selling crack

and “trying to tell [him] that he liked [his] style.” In response to Shorty ’s “talking mad

shit” and posing as a tough “gangsta,” Nas sits Shorty down, sparks a blunt, and

“schools him.” Nas warns him not to think he’s invincible, and that when shit goes

down, so to speak, it’s often the cool kid that ends up dead. Nas’s lesson is not a simple

or completely progressive one—as we might wish for it to be. One may question thedegree to which Nas’s pedagogical responsibility is undermined by his smoking pot

with this youth, for example, or the way in which his parting “Words of wisdom” to “try

to rise up above” and “Keep an eye out for Jake” (the police) may leave other important

words unspoken. However, if the listener of the song is also interpellated into a

pedagogical encounter, Nas’s regretful realization of “Shorty ’s” doomed fate, signaled

by his “cold-blooded” laugh and his “foul” speech—a fate reinforced by the music

video, which ends with Shorty disappearing into a police car—functions as a warning

against possible romanticizing identifications with the “thug.” The way in which the

track both begins and ends with the (implied) arrest of a young black male mirrors the

cyclical and interrupted rhythms of the musical track, as well as the stultified, confined,

and often tragic life that awaits too many poor black males today.

6 T. J. Pollard

7/23/2019 conflcted


In grappling with the problems of black masculinity within the harsh environ-

ment of inner-city poverty, “One Love” also contends with the incarceration of black

fathers and the rippling intergenerational effects of this absence. In the first verse,

addressed to a man who has left behind a “lady ” and a child, Nas tells him, doubtless

with some irony, that he’s now got a son that looks like him. As the father and son

will not meet for some time since his “lady ” refuses to come visit him, the similarity

in appearance may be the only link between the two, aside perhaps from the vitriol

his mother might direct at his father in his absence. In a song about incarcerated

fathers, it may not be too much of a stretch to read the state of the youthful figures in

the song— Jerome’s niece was shot, and little Rob and Shorty have turned to dealing

drugs—as partly the result of absent fathers, foreshadowing a bleak future for the

newborn son. This is made clearer when Nas notes that no one is lending Shorty

doo-wop a hand. Nas’s attempt to “school” Shorty, which seems to leave Shorty

more struck by Nas’s “style” than his advice, can be seen as recognition of Shorty ’s

need of an older male role model—as well as both the possibilities, and thelimitations, of Nas’s ability to fulfill this need.

The absent father and the single mother family are endemic to the black

population of America: “Only 35 percent of black children live with two parents; the

majority live with their mothers” (Perry, 2004, p. 171). This phenomenon, however,

must be understood in relation to larger social structures—specifically, as Nas’s “One

Love” and other songs suggest—in connection with the intensification of the prison-

industrial-complex. As Perry (2004) explains:

The displacement of black men as family heads, resident fathers, and spousal

partners occurred simultaneously with the rapid rise in rates of black male

imprisonment and the deconstruction of civil rights gains made in the 1960s

and early 1970s. (p. 175)

Further, with the rise of the contemporary prison industrial complex, which sees over

one million black males behind bars, this is even more so the case —incarcerated in

Supermax slave houses, black males are unable to be the father figures young black

males desperately need (Dyson, 2010, p. 131). Moreover, high rates of “incarceration

among poor black men affect not only their presence and their ability to provide

economically, but also… [the] emotional and psychological well-being” of the childrenleft without fathers (Perry, 2004, p. 175).

Nas takes up the problem of the absent black father—as well as the importance

of the father’s presence—in “Poppa Was a Playa.” The song, found on The Lost

Tapes, is dedicated to his father for teaching what was right and wrong. Produced by

D-Dot and Kanye West, the song samples the instrumental opening of “The

Newness is Gone” by Eddie Kendricks and is composed of four measure phrases

with a very stable bass line in a minor key that progresses I, IV, V, V. The song is a

complex and ambivalent semiautobiographical portrait of a father – son relationship in

which the father had problems, was often out late, but always came back home, and

the son, idolizing his father, clinging to his legs and listening to his music, does not

yet realize the pain and suffering experienced by his mother. Evoking Nas’s jazz


7/23/2019 conflcted


musician and trumpet-playing father, Olu Dara, the Poppa in this song plays the

streets during the day and often tours with a jazz band as a trumpet player. In

the song’s refrain, Nas puns on two of the meanings of the word “play,” binding the

correct usage of the word, referring to the playing of an instrument (while also

perhaps evoking the “cool,” slick, sensual style with which jazz is often associated), to

the slang term for the habit of flirting or sleeping with many women — which is

often promoted in representations of the “gangsta” or “pimp” stereotype of black

masculinity. If Nas begins the song with the strong declaration that his dad was a

good provider and important member of the family this clever pun complicates the

first, utterly positive description. The chorus, which has a singsong, nursery-rhyme,

child-like cadence, and which features two layers of Nas’s voice, expands in what

may be a perplexed, a critical, as well as perhaps a ruefully admiring tone. Poppa was

a player, but Nas insists that a player is not all that Poppa was. The last part of the

chorus merges Nas’s account with his Poppa’s voice, asking for his allegiance,

creating an exciting father – son secretive bond made vivid by the pair of half-

whispering male voices on the track.

The second verse, which takes a more assertive tone, goes from outright

defending his father to recounting the traumatic events that led to his leaving the

family home. Nas fondly recalls the days when his father and mother were “relaxing”

with “roaches” and “weed” in plain sight. He then goes on to describe, from the

perspective of a young boy, the traumatic experience of coming home to discover his

father—half-naked, with a strange woman and cocaine residue on his face—being

sent packing. His father promised to buy him things if he kept quite and did not say

to his mom and tells him—troublingly —that in the future he would understand andrelate to the situation presumably because they are related by blood, DNA. However,

Nas does not tell us in the song whether he came to understand what his father

meant. He does make it clear that, with age came the realization of the damage his

father inflicted on his mother. He notes that his mother worked very hard and

sacrificed continually to make sure there was food on the table.

Nevertheless, Nas explains that unlike so many kids in the neighborhood who

never knew their fathers—incarcerated or dead—he is ultimately grateful for the

active role his father played during his childhood. While he could have left when he

found out his mother was pregnant he didn’t; instead he stayed, eventually guidingNas from his first steps to becoming a “man.” While this is a rite of passage in many

young boys’ lives as a result of what bell hooks (2004) calls “patriarchal socializa-

tion,” black boys are particularly likely to be forced to be extra “tough” because

adults perceive them as uniquely vulnerable (p. 81). As hooks explains:

It is not just society ’s investment in patriarchal masculinity that demands that

black boys be socialized away from feeling and action; they must also bear the

weight of a psychohistory that represents black males as castrated, ineffectual,

irresponsible, and not real men. It is as if black parents, cross-class, believe they

can write the wrongs of history by imposing onto black boys a more brutal

indoctrination into patriarchal thinking. (pp. 82–83)

8 T. J. Pollard

7/23/2019 conflcted


The understanding of manhood as defined through one’s “toughness” that emerges

in this verse deserves to be criticized for its damaging and limiting impact on black

male subjectivity and perhaps also for its perpetuation of violence. Poppa’s handling

of his son’s discovery of his infidelity and drug use—by offering to buy him things

and by asking the son not to judge him because one day he too will realize he has

“playa” drive inside him—is perhaps still more disturbing. However, I suggest that

the inclusion of such incidents adds to the credibility of Nas’s portrayal, and that it

should not lead us to overlook the importance of Nas’s attempt at addressing the

complicated nature of a black father-son relationship and his valuing of even an

imperfect relationship.

Nas, I suggest, is working to expand and complicate our notion of the way in

which a poor, urban black father may participate in his children’s lives. As Perry

(2004, p. 175) and hooks (2004, p. 80) note, all too often, cultural and legal

expectations define responsible fatherhood solely in terms of providing financial

support. This is problematic, to say the least, given the unemployment from which somany black men suffer, and that, at the same time, black men in particular are less

likely to occupy caring positions than black women and white individuals (see hooks,

2004, p. 80). Research shows that men who can’t offer this assistance are less

involved in their children’s lives: in the absence of the means to offer this support,

black fathers are more likely to feel that they have nothing left to offer their children,

and, out of shame, stay out of their kid’s lives altogether (Perry, 2004, p. 175.). For

many black men, the difficulty lies in imagining alternative ways of being responsible,

of “invent[ing] one’s life” (hooks, 2004, p. 80). In this context, it is significant that,

although the father in this song is initially described as a “Provider,” the son describes

with greater detail and appreciation his Pop’s personal involvement in all the key

moments of his childhood. While Nas recognizes his father’s other flaws, he

understands as one of his father’s most important lessons the very fact that he didn’t

leave: he “stayed till we grew up.”

Indeed, “Poppa Was a Playa” highlights the importance of the father’s

pedagogical role (whether or not we may feel comfortable with the content of his

teachings). Nas recognizes how, although his instruments are his “tight rhymes” and

“pumping beats” rather than a trumpet, his father, nevertheless, clearly influenced his

musical career; Nas notes that he often heard his father’s music as a child. Most

importantly, his father taught him about the struggle to negotiate between one’spersonal needs and desires and one’s responsibility to one’s family. Moreover, Nas

suggests that his father taught him that perhaps the most important time for a father

to be around is a “child’s young years.” Nas simultaneously values his father’s

teaching and encourages his youthful male listeners to learn from it and to embody

actively present, caring fathers with any children they may have. When he recognizes

how tenuous a father’s presence can sometimes be Nas also acknowledges that,

unfortunately, many of his youthful listeners may not at the time be as lucky as he

was. Nas here, in a sense, speaks as though for those fathers who are incapable of

doing so for themselves, offering reassurance to those listeners who might feelabandoned by their fathers. In taking on a kind of fathering pedagogical tone toward

his youthful listeners, Nas is developing and improving on his own father’s legacy.


7/23/2019 conflcted


bell hooks (2004) suggests that patriarchal sex roles are even more rigid when it

comes to black society, and that for many young men—forbidden from expressing

emotions, expected always to be tough, resilient, self-reliant, and able to provide for

the family financially, this is severely damaging (p. 85). Further, while society

continues to present the involvement of the father in the home as a the key to healthy

childhoods, many young black males continue to have a particularly troubled

relationship with their father, whether because he was absent, leaving them feeling

abandoned, or because he was present but abusive (hooks, 2004, p. 97). Yet, as

hooks (2004) reminds us:

the underlying issue is less the absence of fathers and more the painful lack of

emotional engagement by fathers, whether they are continually present or not.

No matter the huge amount of evidence documenting the damaging impact of

loveless father-child relationships; most black people continue to believe that

fathers do not matter as much as mothers. (p. 98)

It is against such assumptions that Nas’s “Poppa Was a Playa” works. Here Nas

provides an alternative not only to the more stereotypical examples of black masculinity

found in rap and hip-hop, such as gangsta, pimp, thug, but also to simplistic

understandings of what it means to be a good father. The father in “Poppa Was a

Playa” is a drug user who cheats on his woman and eventually leaves her, and thus by no

means an ideal father, but this is both what makes him a believable figure and what

enables Nas to undercut reductive dichotomous images of either the never-present

father or the Bill Cosby-like fantasy father. Mark Anthony Neal (2010) writes that:

For so many black men and their fathers, their relationship is marked by distinct

silences—each marking his own masculinity with the subtleties of respect, fear,

anger, arrogance, disappointment, pride, and wonder that are rarely directed at

each other, but always lurking unspoken. (p. 121)

If black boys—future black fathers—are particularly discouraged from expressing

emotions, according to hooks (2004), during their early childhood (p. 81), it is all the

more striking that Nas ends a song about his father’s significant role in his childhood

with an open declaration of love: “

I love you still/Always will.”

In “Poppa Was a Playa,” as in “One Love” and other songs, Nas can be seen to

embody the position of a “celebrity Gramscian,” a popular public intellectual with the

ability to transform, for a large commercial audience, private problems into public

issues. In “Poppa Was a Playa,” Nas not only tells a personal story about a troubled

relationship with his present-absent father, he consciously reaches out to his listeners,

addressing what he supposes may be different or shared experiences with their

fathers. He invites them to be critical of fathers who abandoned their babies from the

get-go and of those who gave pain to the mothers of their children; and appreciative

of fathers who did their best to stick around, not merely offering financial assistance

but real involvement in their son’s early adventures. Further still, he uses the issues

of fatherhood and responsibility to youth as an opportunity to make a pedagogical

10 T. J. Pollard

7/23/2019 conflcted


intervention. In “One Love,” Nas used the framework of the absent, incarcerated

father of a newborn son and a neglected, drug-dealing youth as an entry point into a

deglamorization of the “thug” image of black masculinity. In “Poppa Was a Playa,”

Nas couples a complex representation of a father – son relationship with a call to

future fathers among his listeners to take responsibility to be present for theirchildren in whatever caring way they can.

It is the conflicted “state of mind” which I have been drawing attention to

throughout my analysis of “One Love” and “Poppa Was a Playa” that enables Nas to

occupy a pedagogical position overdetermined neither by a calcified hypermasculi-

nity, nor by the kind of dogmatism too often proclaimed from the pulpit of moral

purity. By situating himself within patriarchal parameters that are circumscribed all

the more narrowly by the “gangsta culture” of popular rap music, Nas is able to

construct a pedagogy that acknowledges and yet expands what is possible within

these limits. As a “celebrity Gramscian,” Nas puts to work complex explorations of poor black masculinity in order to transform private problems into opportunities for

reflection on public ills.

Note

[1] For copyright reasons I do not quote directly from either “One Love” or “Poppa Was a Playa”

at any length. The lyrics for both tracks can easily be obtained online.

References

Dyson, M. E. (2010). ‘One Love,’ two brothers, three verses. In M. E. Dyson & S. Daulatzai (Eds.),

Born to use mics: Reading Nas’s illmatic (pp. 129–151). New York, NY: Basic Civitas Books.

Gaunt, K. D. (2010). ‘One Time 4 Your Mind’: Embedding Nas into a gendered state of mind. In M. E.

Dyson & S. Daulatzai (Eds.), Born to use mics: Reading Nas’s Illmatic (pp. 151–78). New York, NY:

Basic Civitas Books.

hooks, b. (2004). We real cool: Black men and masculinity . New York, NY: Routledge.

Lamont Hill, M. (2010). Critical pedagogy comes at halftime: Nas as black public intellectual. In M. E.

Dyson & S. Daulatzai (Eds.), Born to use mics: Reading Nas’s Illmatic (pp. 97–116). New York, NY:

Basic Civitas Books.

Mills, C. W. (1959). The sociological imagination. New York, NY: Oxford.

Nas. (1994a). Life’ a bitch. On Illmatic. New York, NY: Columbia Record.

Nas. (1994b). One love. On Illmatic. New York, NY: Columbia Records.Nas. (2002). Poppa was a playa. On The Lost Tapes. New York, NY: Columbia Records.

Nas. (2006). Can’t forget about you. On Hip hop is dead . New York, NY: Def Jam Records.

Nas. (2008). Untitled . New York, NY: Columbia and Def Jam Records.

Neal, A. M. (1999). What the music said: Black popular music and black popular culture. New York, NY:

Routledge.

Neal, A. M. (2010). ‘Memory Lane:’ On jazz, hip-hop, and fathers. In M. E. Dyson & S. Daulatzai

(Eds.), Born to use mics: Reading Nas’s illmatic, (pp. 117–129). New York, NY: Basic Civitas Books.

Perry, I. (2004). Prophets of the hood: Politics and poetics in hip hop. Durham: Duke UP.

Peterson, J. B. (2010). ‘It’s Yours’: Hip-hop worldviews in the lyrics of Nas. In M. E. Dyson & S.

Daulatzai (Eds.), Born to use mics: Reading Nas’s illmatic, (pp. 75–96). New York, NY: Basic Civitas

Books.Rose, T. (2008). The hip hop wars: What we talk about when we talk about hip hop – and why it matters. New

York, NY: Basic Civitas Books.


Documents

conflcted