Will the new Nas be any good?

Either one of these Africans got their hands on a copy of the new Nas album and is leaking it one track at a time, or maybe the label itself figures Nas can do Lil Wayne (and also Terminate on Sight?) numbers by giving away damn near the entire thing for free in advance of its release. Every time you turn around these days, there's some new Nas shit hitting the Internets.

Lazy as I am, I couldn't bring myself to download any more than the first few of them. But I'm a lazy motherfucker. Sometimes, I won't even get up to turn on the TV when I can't find the remote, even when I'm sober. I'd rather just sit there and enjoy the silence. I figured it would probably be easier to wait until the entire thing leaked (this has gotta happen any day now, right?) and download it all at once.

Fortunately, I was surfing the Internets just now, and I came across a zip file with seemingly all of the new Nas shit in it, nine tracks in total. What follows are my thoughts on the joints in this folder.

Without further ado:

Black President

The joint from the mixtape with the lame-ass 2Pac sample. Is this gonna be on the album in same form that it appears on the mixtape (though presumably without any bullshit scratching or anything on it)? The more I listen to this, the more it sounds like some shit Will.I.Am would have come up with. Yes we can!

Breathe

I think I read somewhere this isn't actually gonna be on the album. Which is good. This is some nasty R&B Mint Condition sounding shit. Was Nicolay involved with this? These lyrics might not have been that bad over something a bit more hip-hop sounding.

Fried Chicken

My new favorite rap song evar. Though I should note, as I mentioned the other day to people who are bored enough to read my Twitter, that, if I was a rapper, I would have been made a song about fried chicken. Look at how many songs there are about smoking weed. Fuck smoking weed. Listening to Nas and Busta's raps on this, you can tell this isn't a matter of mere provocation. These guys obviously love fried chicken. I'm sure many would argue that was self-evident, with them being black and all. Fucking racists.

Hero

The Polow da Don joint from the mixtape. It's actually grown on me since I first heard it a couple of weeks ago, even though it was produced by Polow da Don. Was this also a preset in Garage Band? If so, I might need to pick up a copy of Garage Band. Fuck this blogging shit. Anybody want to spring for a copy of Garage Band for me? My pockets are a little bit light right now.

N.I.G.G.E.R.

On the other hand, I wasn't even that big a fan of that one song Toomp did with T.I., let alone the limp bullshit he's done. The fact that T.I. doesn't even work with him anymore should have been a sign to Nas. That's why Nas doesn't have as much money as Jay-Z. Things that would be obvious to most people just don't seem to occur to Nas. I read on, I think, MTV the other day that Nas was dropping "Be a Nigger Too" from the album because he didn't want too many dreaded n-word records on the album. I'd much rather have that on the album than this. That song was hilarious.

Nigger Hatred

This is gonna be the intro? I probably would have liked it better if it wasn't almost a capella.

Queens Get the Money

Wait, what the fuck is this? Another Nas-rapping-over-a-piano joint? Why? On this one in particular, Nas' raps don't seem to align rhythmically with the piano mess in the background. On the one hand, it sounds like he's impassioned to the point where he can't be bothered to mind the backing track, such as it is. But on the other hand, it just kinda sounds like a mess. I can't imagine I'll be playing either this or "Nigger Hatred" back very many times once I actually get my "special critics version" of this album.

Sly Fox

Another one of my favorites, right up there with "Fried Chicken," the limp-sounding rock guitars in the chorus notwithstanding. Nas goes in re: Fox News. It's hilarious in a High Times kind of way. You'll recall that Bill O'Reilly was trying to throw Nas under a bus back when he was scheduled to perform at Virginia Tech in the wake of that incident where that sex-starved Chinaman shot all those people. I wonder if Bill-O's gonna do a segment on this. I haven't watched an episode of the O'Reilly Factor since forever.

You Can't Stop Us Now

If I was a producer, I don't know if I could handle the fact that I somehow managed to flip a sample even worse than the 2008-era RZA. This isn't so good that someone in management over in Def Jam shouldn't step in and be like, "You know what? RZA put this same record out as a single a few weeks ago, and hardly anyone even liked that. It's probably in our best interest to just leave this off of the album. Nas doesn't have a joint with Primo on this yet, right? Let's get the two of them in a studio together. That's usually a good idea." Bol > everyone who works at Def Jam.