Why Nas thought hip-hop was dead in 2006
With his eighth album, Hip Hop Is Dead, Nas embraced his role as a contrarian. With a title like that, coming from one of hip-hop’s great MCs, he generated a bit of controversy.
But the album’s title wasn’t just a desire to create controversy for controversy’s sake. Nas seemed, too, to earnestly hold the message of the album’s title to heart. He argued at the time that hip-hop really had died long ago, and, as he cynically put it to Pitchfork, “the object of the game now is to make money off of exploiting it.”
Nas went one further in this same interview, claiming that hip-hop wasn’t alone in its demise. “Mostly every form of American music is dead,” he argued, before conceding that there was a “handful” of “great guys” and “great female artists” that were the exceptions. Generally speaking, though, he maintained that American music was in the pan.
As for hip-hop specifically, Nas argued that the killer blow came in the wake of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls’ respective murders. Without them around, the “creativity” and “artistry” of hip-hop took a dive, from which Nas believed it never truly recovered.
Nas also believed that hip-hop was a victim of its own success, as, once it had spread around the world, it lost touch with its own roots. “By becoming global,” he argued, “no one knows where it comes from. No one knows who is doing it right.”
He felt the more globalised nature of hip-hop would damage the younger generation of aspiring artists, who would lose sight of what was authentic and what was not. Hip-hop, by becoming globally successful, had become too much about business rather than artistry.
While he conceded he was part of this problem, having himself gotten “lost in the shuffle and the touring and the money and the business and the working and the running,” he was nonetheless insistent that hip-hop’s turn towards commercialism had damaged it. This certainly seemed ironic in light of his earlier assertion that the only thing left to do with hip-hop was “to make money off of exploiting it.”
Nas’ explanation for the demise of hip-hop seemed, at times, confused and contradictory, but he also spoke about the subject in other interviews, where his thinking appeared to be a little bit more coherent. Speaking on Tim Westwood’s radio show to promote the album, Nas explained that hip-hop was dead because “artists no longer have the power.”
Hip-hop had come to be dominated by businesspeople and execs, Nas believed, which had hollowed out the culture at its heart. What was left was a shell of the culture he had once loved and contributed to.