Conflicted state of mind: Race, masculinity, and Nas's lyric public pedagogy

Abstract

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

Notes

[1] For copyright reasons I do not quote directly from either “One Love” or “Poppa Was a Playa” at any length.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