Ideology and Nas

Nas' ideology--or, if you're one of those wanks who, like myself, can't quite pinpoint among the 75 zillion subtle variations on the definition of such a contentious word, "unified set of assumptions taken collectively as the point from which he writes,"--is, as you can probably imagine, difficult to summarize. Its problems are similar to the ones I'm facing right now, not two sentences into this essay. To locate it in a single line, one could do worse than to choose "I ain't droppin' knowledge. I'm dropping the stuff you need to learn, though."
To call this line a paradox is to understate the case. Is Nas somehow differentiating between "knowledge" and "stuff you need to learn"? Are there things you need to learn that are somehow outside the definition of knowledge? Wouldn't knowledge, by its very definition, encompass all things necessary to learn? All things learned, necessary or not?

Well, no.

Nas is much too nuanced for these sorts of umbrella definitions. "Knowledge," to Nas, foregrounds the assumptions of the dominant culture. The history Nas raps about, then, is not the "history" taught in school. He's not rapping about the historical importance of judicial review or the moral fortitude of Lincoln's emancipation of the slaves. He's, instead, looking at history from the position of the marginalized, a position so counter to the dominant paradigm in which "history" fulfills its obligations that Nas's history can scarely be called the same thing. In this way, his "knowledge" isn't knowledge in the ideological sense. Rather than conforming to the necessary function of knowledge, Nas's knowledge serves to undermine it.

So, not surprisingly, we find a certain hostility towards both language and "traditional" (or ideological) conceptions of history in Nas's songs. Both function as a framework through which we become placated by the ruling class. On several songs, for instance, Nas claims to "overstand" a concept rather than "understand" it. This can be read as an extremely hostile attack on the implication that concepts come before, and are hence superior to, humans. To understand something would place one beneath--and at the mercy of--that which is being understood. And that thing is, to Nas, ideological in nature. And to a culture that has been consistantly exploited in the name of "economic sustainability," the overthrow of the power of concepts is an extremely worthwhile endeavor.

Nas's use of history is most notable in what I call his Third Verse Historical Narrative, where he attempts to clarify the points he brings up in the first two verses through a revisionist and radical understanding of history. In "What Goes Around," Nas claims:

The Chinaman built the railroads
The Indians fed the Pilgrims
And in return the Pilgrims killed them
They call it Thanksgiving
I call your holiday Hell Day
Because I'm from poverty
Neglected by the wealthy.


In doing so, Nas relates three interconnected modes of dialectical subjugation, all variations of Hegel's "Master/Slave" dialectic, in which any attempt on the part of the slave to subvert the master is necessarily immediately overcome by the very nature of the dialectic itself. The Chinaman's attempt at economic placation is immediately thwarted by the very act. The mode of production underpinning the Chinaman’s sacrifice for his new country is exactly that which exploits him. Taking a different route, the Indians fed the Pilgrims in an attempt to establish peaceful relations through their own mode of production. The difference is that the Chinaman had to establish peaceful relations through an existing exploitive system, whereas the Indians fell victim to the foreign Pilgrim system. The moral being that one can operate under their own modes of production or the capitalistic one, and by capitalism’s very nature, it will still exploit. Capitalism, in other words, doesn’t care whether or not the people it exploits are capitalists themselves.

The third, then, is Nas himself, from poverty, neglected by the wealthy. Unlike the Indians, Nas is subsumed within the current mode of late capitalism. Unlike the Chinaman, Nas was not complicit in his own exploitation. He was simply a victim of circumstances. He draws a direct parallel between his Third Verse Historical Narrative and himself, where the ideology, the false consciousness comes full circle and is immediately rejected out of hand as “poison.” And that isn’t simply knowledge, it’s the stuff you need to learn, though.