On his last LP, Nas killed hip-hop to clear ground for a glorious resurrection, starring himself as mortician-turned-messiah. "Hip-hop was aborted," he raps on this new track from his forthcoming album, "so Nas breathes life back into the embryo." Fittingly, "Queens Get the Money" is elementary, omitting the drums and bass that have been hip-hop's lifeblood. Up-and-comer Jay Electronica's track is just skating piano phrases, of a piece with Child Rebel Soldiers' glassy, Thom Yorke-sampling mixtape cut "Us Placers".
Lyrically, Nas offers up a digest of his own tics: We get a couple brain-melting similes ("I'm over they heads like a bulimic on a seesaw"), some sociopolitical laments ("Pregnant teens give birth to intelligent gangsters, they daddies faceless"), hood-status touchiness ("Talking that Nas done fell off with rhyming/ He'd rather floss with diamonds"), and megalomaniacal fantasy (uh, remember when Nas "punched down devils that brought down the towers"?).
He really does have something deep and trenchant to say about the state of hip-hop, if you can ferret it out from the free-associative boilerplate: Consider the conflation of "Huey P. and Louis V.," alongside Nas' new moniker, "Nasty NASDAQ." Revolution blurs into fashion, outlaw rappers become legitimate businessmen, and a music born of the revolutionary spirit reckons with its assimilation into what it rails against.
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