I realize that it isn’t proper etiquette for a “music critic” to start out a review with a disclaimer, but when Nas first released his debut album Illmatic in the spring of 1994, I was just a 13-year-old little white kid skipping my seventh grade classes in a small town south of Dallas, Texas. On account of this, I will make no attempt to try to pretend that I have even the first idea of what exactly inspired the sounds, rhythms, and rhymes of Nas’s hip-hop philosophy that sprung up from the asphalt, brick, and concrete sages of Queensbridge.

However, I can say, as a testament to Nas as an artist and the quality of his work, there has always been something in his music - something in his lyrical delivery that somehow bridged the gap between a naive and (by all means) sheltered kid in rural Texas and a street-wise, hardened black man from the Crown Heights to the shadows of the Queensboro Bridge. And I suppose this is what great music is meant to do - to speak to that sense in the deepest part of all human beings, regardless of their race, background, or religion - to awaken our conscience to a common understanding - a common ground, regardless of the distance or conflicts between us.

Nas’s latest effort, Untitled, has finally emerged from under the veil of controversy that preceded its July 15^th release. On October 12, 2007, Nas announced that his follow-up to 2006’s Hip Hop Is Dead would be entitled Nigger in response to the backlash that civil rights authorities waged against the word after the “Michael Richards incident” at the Laugh Factory in 2006. And, despite the criticism that the hype around its initial title and Nas’s more recent petition against Fox News (and Bill O’Reilly in particular) are shameless publicity stunts to promote his new album, Untitled is a remarkably solid work and marks the standard to which all subsequent hip-hop albums will be measured for the rest of 2008 and beyond.

From the beginning, we’re introduced to a stripped-down and simple guitar riff and a soft, steady stand-up bass, kick-drum, and snare on the opening track, “You Can’t Stop Us Now.” Raw. Honest. Throughout, Untitled sounds live, with the skilled use of brass and string sections, pianos, and electric and acoustic guitars mixed over more laid-back beats and clear, crisp bass lines. A musically rich and complete album, tracks such as “Testify” roll with a soul reminiscent of the golden era of “Hitsville, USA,” while “Sly Fox” (a jab at the Fox News network) pounds over a hard riff off an electric guitar and a trap set.

Nas is raging against the systems of political correctness, political opinion polls, lawsuits, and 24-hour news cycles that are suffocating free expression, free speech, and the truth. “In America, you never be free/Middle fingers up”; Untitled is Nas just asking to “Breathe.”

By all means, Untitled is a political album. Yet, even more than its political edge (an artistic reflection to the historical significance of the 2008 presidential election), Untitled is a sincere, brutally honest album. In contrast to the lyrical battles and chest-thumping anthems that have tended to dominate the hip-hop charts, Nas has set out to stir up an awareness - a social perspective that demands to be recognized and respected.

In “America,” one of the most poignant tracks on Untitled, the rhymes weigh as heavy as the beats when he delivers:

Love to sit in on the Senate
And tell the whole government
Y’all don’t treat women fair
She read about herself in the Bible
Believing she the reason sin is here
You played her, with an apron
Like bring me my dinner, dear
She the nigger here
Ain’t we in the free world
Death penalty in Texas kill young boys and girls
Barbarity, I’m in the double-R casually
Bugging how I made it out the hood, dazzle me
How far we really from third world savagery
When the empire fall, imagine how crazy that’ll be…

There is no question that this year has marked the beginning of a new era in our country’s cultural, social, and political maturation. Our tensions are as high as our expectations, and our convictions run as deep and as wide in our collective psyches as all of our hopes and dreams for the future. Untitled speaks to that one facet of the human condition that so many of us try so hard to avoid - to gloss over for the sake of comfort and convenience but remains the one and only thing that will carry us forth boldly, unified, into the realization of our hopes and dreams for our future: honesty.

Nas’s new album is a plea for an open forum to speak to the shadows, the pains, and the sins of the past. Rather than sweep the table scraps under the table to be ignored, Nas is demanding an honest discourse, a free expression of the emotions and experiences that resonate with the reality of our cultural and historical conditions. Honestly, it’s not comfortable. No, it’s almost threatening. However, I’m refreshed to hear an album as raw, transparent, and genuine as Untitled in a day when so much of the industry is being gorged by shallow, superficial, and trite attempts for fame and fortune.

Untitled offers a powerful, incisive message from perhaps hip-hop’s most prophetic voice.

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