From Born to Use Mics: Reading Nas’s Illmatic, an essay collection which Lamont Hill both contributed to and co-edited. Purchase it hereDespite its placement in the middle of the album, "Halftime" in many ways represents the beginning of the Illmatic legacy. Nearly three years before Columbia Records released Illmatic, Nas made hip-hop history by stealing the show on Main Source's classic 1991 posse cut "Live at the BBQ" featuring Joe Fatal, Akinyele, and Large Professor. The subsequent buzz from Nas's verse (“Verbal assassin, my architect pleases/When l was twelve, I went to hell for snuffin' Jesus") prompted 3rd Bass’s MC Serch to recruit him for the soundtrack to Zebrahead, Anthony Drazan's low-budget race movie. (1) Nas responded with the Large Professor-produced battle track “Halftime,” a strong lead single on an otherwise forgettable album. Through a clever mix of braggadocio and sharp lyricism, the artist still officially known as "Nasty Nas" created an underground hit and a national buzz. "Halftime" was so well received that it was also placed on Illmatic in order to secure sales as well as please loyal underground fans. Although the musical value of "Halftime" is significant, it is dwarfed by the larger implications of the song and the Illmatic album within the public sphere. As Nas's first official single, “Halftime" marked a watershed moment in his career and in the cultural life of a generation, signaling Nas's first full-fledged foray into the world of black public intellectuals.

Throughout the Illmatic album, Nas performs the most critical function of the public intellectual: linking a rigorous engagement with the life of the mind to an equally rigorous engagement with the public and its problems. (2) While not as pensive or contemplative as some of Illmatic's more celebrated tracks like "One Love" or "Life's a Bitch," "Halftime" is in many ways a more precise representation of Nas's intellectual project. as it brings together two allegedly irreconcilable camps within the hip-hop community: “conscious” and "commercial." Although these terms are wholly artificial and insufficient for understanding the complexities of artistic identity, they serve as useful tools for understanding the current division of labor within hip-hop's cultural landscape.

Within hip-hop culture. the terms "conscious" and "commercial"—as well as others like "political" and "mainstream"— are assigned to rappers in ways that divide them into discrete categories. Through these terms, artists develop public identities that shape the ways they are understood and engaged by various audiences. In addition to prefiguring artist-audience relationships, such divisions are often based on superficial criteria. For example, despite the relatively apolitical nature of their work, groups like The Roots and A Tribe Called Quest are hastily branded "conscious" or "political" because of their avant-garde music and aesthetics. On the contrary, the political critiques and philanthropy of "mainstream" rappers like Jay-Z and Ice Cube are often overlooked or dismissed. Within this superficial framework, hip-hop political consciousness is reduced to a thin politics of fashion and speech that privileges bourgeois bohemianism over engaged social critique and concrete action.

The construction of a conscious/commercial divide also undermines a sophisticated and evenhanded analysis of all hip-hop artists. Too often, commercial figures like Jay-Z and Ice Cube are classified as mere rappers who are only worthy of critical attention in order to expose the troubling dimensions of their music. On the other hand, "conscious" rappers like Talib Kweli and Mos Def are romantically viewed as legitimate cultural workers whose work should be analyzed based on artistic merit. Such distinctions are highly problematic, however, as they obscure the complexities and contradictions that operate within every artist's body of work. For example, Jay-Z has written songs that critique the American invasion of Iraq (“Beware of the Boys"), post-9/11 race relations ("Ballad for the Fallen Soldier"), and the nation’s response to Hurricane Katrina (“Minority Report"); in his solo and group projects, Ice Cube has consistently critiqued police brutality (“Fuck Da Police"), black Christianity ("Heaven"), and white supremacy (“The Nigga Trapp"). Talib Kweli and Mos Def, on the other hand, have both appeared on songs that deploy homophobic language (“REDEFinition," “The Rape Over"). By ignoring such work or dismissing it as the exception to an otherwise useful rule, we squander valuable opportunities to enrich our understanding of hip-hop identities, as well as the forces that help constitute them.

No hip-hop artist better spotlights the poverty of the conscious/commercial divide than Nas, whose refusal to fit neatly into either category provides the basis for his artistic identity. (3) Unlike most rappers, Nas has a thoroughly equivocal relationship to both the commercial and conscious sectors of hip-hop culture. Despite his commercial leanings, Nas openly moves between each space in ways that defy the dominant logic and practices of hip-hop. As opposed to his counterparts, Nas’s movement between the conscious and commercial realms is not understood as a momentary departure from his "true" artistic self, such as when hard-core rapper Jadakiss released the politically charged single “Why.” Instead, Nas is viewed by fans and critics as the rare artist who can traverse the boundaries of each territory with equal skill. This artistic ambidexterity is acknowledged by Nas himself on songs like Kanye West’s "We Major," where he uses a guest verse to deliberate about whether to write a verse about “44s or Black Christ," “big paper or the Black man's plight.” This type of public rumination, which occurs on a track with Kanye West, whose artistic identity also embodies this tension, combined with his conclusion that "both flows would be nice," demonstrates Nas's intentionality and comprehension of his position.

Despite the public's recognition of Nas's modus operandi, many view his fluid artistic identity as a shortcoming rather than a virtue. This discomfort with Nas surfaced during his well-publicized feud with Jay-Z, who pointed out Nas's alleged contradictions in his 2002 title track “Blueprint 2":

"You can't give cred to anything dude said

Same dude give you ice and you owe him some head . ..

Is it "Oochie Wally Wally" or is it "One Mic“?

Is it "Black Girl Lost" or Shonie owe you for ice?" (4)

Like many hip-hop observers, Jay-Z viewed Nas's penchant for releasing radio-friendly songs like “Oochie Wally Wally" and "You Owe Me" as directly contradictory to the content of his socially conscious songs like “One Mic" and "Black Girl Lost." Jay-Z's critique of the moral and ideological contradictions within Nas's music is accurate, particularly with regard to the consumerist and misogynistic impulses that animate his commercial releases. Still, Jay-Z's comments also reflect a deep suspicion of Nas's authenticity as a conscious artist based on his location within the commercial marketplace.

Suspicions regarding artistic authenticity are animated by a belief that “real” art cannot exist in the capitalist marketplace. As a result, artists who move from the margins to the center of the commercial sphere are often viewed as “sellouts” whose work no longer honors the spirit of the craft. While this claim is true in certain cases — such as the underground-turned-pop group Black Eye Peas, for whom such a choice was deliberate and unabashed — it cannot be held as a universal truth claim about commercially successful artists. Conversely, it is equally problematic to view commercial marginality (i.e., lack of sales) as an index of artistic integrity or quality. Such an approach is deeply problematic, as it overestimates the extent to which artists choose not to operate within mainstream circles, and it romanticizes the underground as a space untouched by the same corporate capitalist forces as mainstream spheres. An excellent example of this reality is the rap group The Roots, who are often viewed by critics and fans as exemplars of authentic and untampered artistry. Despite their reputation for self-imposed marginality within the hip-hop community, the group has written multiple singles (e.g., “You Got Me," "Break You Off") expressly aimed at mainstream radio audiences and mass sales. Additionally, the group's label, Def Jam, is owned by Universal Music Group, which has more than a 25 percent market share in the music industry. As such, the group not only willfully operates squarely within the capitalist marketplace but helps promote and finance pop acts (like Black Eye Peas) that are also under the Universal Music Group umbrella. This is not to suggest that The Roots are less authentic than popularly imagined, but that any sophisticated notion of authenticity must consider the ways in which artistic identities are crafted in relation to pervasive forces of global capitalism.

In classifying Nas as an intellectual, we must reconsider the possible sites where intellectual work occurs. In the case of Nas, it becomes necessary to look beyond formal locations such as universities, think tanks, and literary circles, and look to the highly contested domain of hip-hop culture. While many critics and scholars have argued the intellectual merit of hip-hop culture and its practitioners (in many ways this has been the unifying thread of contemporary hip-hop studies), much of their work has relied on a narrow conception of hip-hop that distinguishes it from rap. Within this limited and limiting framework, debates about Nas as an intellectual can only be resolved after first determining where he fits along a hip-hop/rap continuum that is often used to evaluate hip-hop artists. This framework enables fans, artists, and critics to mimic the elitist postures of earlier European traditions by creating high/low distinctions within the culture. (5) Through these distinctions, “rap” (low culture) becomes shorthand for the most problematic aspects of hip-hop culture (commercialism, sexism, violence, etc.) and “hip-hop" (high culture) is represented as a space for genuine artistry and political consciousness. These divisions also facilitate the cooptation of black art by corporate interests and parasitic (read: white) cultural forces through all too familiar divide-and-conquer tactics. An excellent example of this is the growing overrepresentation of suburban and bohemian whites within the conscious fan base, as reflected in retail consumption and concert attendance. As in the case of jazz, such trends allow ostensibly highbrow hip-hop to be dislocated from its original cultural homes and appropriated by whites and bourgeois intellectuals. Additionally, these high/low distinctions prevent us from recognizing the intellectual merit of ordinary people and popular culture.

The dilemma Nas confronts is not peculiar to him or to other black cultural workers who initially gain popularity with the general public. Those who are intellectuals by profession (i.e., professors and researchers) but begin to encroach upon the popular territory typically reserved for actors, athletes, and politicians are equally derided for their activities inside and outside of academe. Figures like Michael Eric Dyson and Cornel West, two of the most visible and influential black public intellectuals of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, are met with great skepticism from those outside of the academy who question the authenticity of their organic links to community, as well as from their academic colleagues for departing from traditionally narrow and technocratic standards of academic productivity and rigor. (6) An example of the academy's intolerance with black intellectuals came in the spring of 2002, when Cornel West became embroiled in a public feud with Harvard University president Larry Summers over West's public intellectual activities, particularly his involvement with the 2004 Al Sharpton presidential campaign, appearance in the latter two Matrix films, and release of a spoken-word poetry (not hip-hop!) album. (7) Summers argued that such activities were unbefitting a Harvard University professor, and that West should focus exclusively on writing peer-refereed publications.

Similiar to Nas, intellectuals like Dyson and West are victims of a vicious turf war, which demands that one choose between the academy and the outside world. The stakes of this war are grounded in the assumption that "real" intellectual activity is naturally incompatible with popular culture. In short, intellectuals cannot be celebrities and celebrities cannot be intellectuals. Analogous to the artificial conscious/commercial divide within hip-hop culture, this Manichean stance is underpinned by Western capitalism’s emphasis on specialization over versatility, narrowness over proteanism. Within the logic of this purist ethic, academic work (as well as the academic herself) is compromised by an engagement with real-world problems. Again, like the conscious/commercial binary, such a belief obscures the ways in which the academy's walls are inevitably porous, infiltrated by myriad political agendas, ideological commitments, and relations of capital that constitute its very existence. (8)

This shortsighted stance was exemplified in 2002 when neoconservative scholars John Patrick Diggins, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Hilton Kramer, and lrving Kristol threatened to boycott an academic conference on Sidney Hook after being notified that Cornel West was added to the list of participants. When questioned, Diggins responded that he was “concerned about whether [West] has any point of in matters of philosophy." He also added that "one would have to read at least 20 of [Hook's] books. Cornel West is such a celebrity intellectual, I don't think he'll have time for it." (9) In addition to evincing the racist paternalism that governs collegial relations with many black intellectuals, Diggins's comment speaks to a pervasive sense that an intellectual cannot “return home" after entering the realm of popular culture. Despite being perfectly qualified to speak on Sidney Hook—in addition to being the only trained philosopher on the panel—in his book American Evasion of Philosophy West provides a substantive, critically lauded treatment of Hook’s work—West‘s status as a public intellectual was viewed as a professional demerit that denied him access to the very spaces that he was accused of abandoning.

The punitive treatment black intellectuals receive for functioning outside of the ivory tower is not only an outgrowth of narrow-minded romanticism, which can be excused as misguided idealism or naivete, but also a tradition of repressing particular strands of intellectual activism. It is within this tradition that Cornel West’s public support of Al Sharpton, Edward Said’s demands for an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and Noam Chomsky's critiques of American imperialism are treated as extracurricular and inappropriate while the pro-conservative activities of public intellectuals like Alan Dershowitz, John McWhorter, or Diane Ravitch are excused or critiqued solely on the basis of ideas. This disparity in treatment speaks to the ways in which intellectuals who work in the interest of black and brown communities are policed in an effort to transform them into “coopted progressives" rather than "intellectuals in exile" who are in the academy but not of it.

Among progressive scholars, a narrow view of the life of the mind is also informed by an outmoded conception of the public intellectual that does not adequately consider the potential of popular culture as a legitimate site for transformative intellectual work. For example, Michael Eric Dyson's immediate and effective rejoinder to Bill Cosby’s neoconservative critiques of the black poor beginning with his 2004 “pound cake" speech was largely linked to his ability to operate within the same spaces that Cosby used to offer his commentary. Rather than merely responding within left-wing academic circles (which generally held Cosby's critiques to be facile, stale, and uninteresting except to the extent that they were linked to his celebrity status), Dyson occupied the same public venues that Cosby used to preach his hostile gospel of individual responsibility. By appearing on national television shows ranging from Nightline to Rap City and writing his best-selling book Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has The Black Man Lost Its Mind? Dyson was able to leverage his fame and media access in ways that countervailed Cosby's dangerous rhetoric.

While these examples demonstrate the dangers of prima facie rejections of public intellectual work, it is equally important not to ignore potential pitfalls. For Nas as well as traditional academics, access to mainstream audiences can become an end in itself, transforming them into celebrity rather than public intellectuals. Instead of functioning as an engaged cultural worker. the black intellectual is then reduced to, at best, a glib and detached cultural critic or, at worst, a politically promiscuous spokesperson for an imaginary constituency. As the work of Nas (as well as Dyson and West) suggests, however, such outcomes are not inevitable. Instead, the conditions of public prominence can be manipulated in ways that yield concrete benefits for the people represented by public intellectuals.

For both Nas and traditional academics, it is the relationship between the popular and the political that constitutes both the form and content of black public intellectual work. In his essay on Nigerian political musician Fela Kuti, Mark Anthony Neal introduces the term "celebrity Gramiscian" in order to (post)modernize Gramsci's conception of organic intellectuals as the “thinking and organizing element of a particular fundamental social class." As Neal argues, it is necessary to expand our definition in order to account for those organic intellectuals who utilize their fame in order to further a particular political agenda. The notion of the celebrity Gramscian is extremely important for understanding the black public intellectual.

Although Neal accurately cites explicitly political (or at least politicized) hip-hop figures like Talib Kweli, Common, and Mos Def as examples of celebrity Gramscians, these artists are hampered by the mass public's general ambivalence or unawareness in relation to their music. Despite receiving sustained critical acclaim for their albums, none of the artists have attained platinum sales (the contemporary benchmark for mainstream hip-hop success) for their efforts, which, along with limited radio airplay and smaller concert venues, has undermined their ability to reach mass audiences through their music. Also, despite the "raced" nature of their music—all of the artists openly draw from black musical traditions and openly write their music for black audiences—the primary consumers of their live and recorded music are not African American. On the contrary, Nas's consistent platinum sales and largely urban black fan base are a testament both to his ability to successfully move across the commercial and conscious worlds and to his efficacy as a celebrity Gramscian.

As Grant Farred argues in his book What's My Name, the nexus between the popular and the political within black intellectual spaces is linked to the vernacular tradition." Through this tradition, which is rooted in an engagement with the popular. we are able to understand how a wide range of figures engage in intellectual activity. For Farred, Bob Marley's music, Muhammad Ali's "trash talking," Stuart Hall's theory, and CLR James's writing, despite their disparate ideologies and vocational locations, can all be seen as legitimate intellectual production that operates in the interests of their respective communities. With regard to Nas, the site of intellectual labor is rap music, which is steeped in the hip~hop vernacular traditions of storytelling and signifyin'. Through his music, Nas engages in rigorous intellection in the form of cultural criticism and public pedagogy.

Like other black public intellectuals, Nas uses the public sphere as a space for critically engaging pressing social issues of the day. While Nas's cultural critiques are often conveyed through explicitly political songs like “I Want to Talk to You” and "New World," such commentaries have typically failed to garner critical approval or commercial attention. On the contrary, Nas’s most successful work has emerged more comfortably through the practice of lyrical storytelling. Through his lyrical representations, Nas functions as an informal ethnographer by consistently offering an on-the-ground counternarrative of day-to-day ghetto life.

Unlike intellectuals who operate within traditional academic spaces, Nas faces a unique burden of authenticity when engaging in his storytelling practices. In addition to personal stories, Nas's music also includes third-person narratives and autobiographical fiction. Although these are common Western literary devices, they conflict with hip-hop's authenticity fetish, which demands that artists “keep it real," or rap exclusively about personal experience. Within this context. to be "real" is to participate in particular practices (violence, drug use. etc.) or to have access to specific experiences (poverty, absentee parenting, etc.) that have become normalized within the hip-hop context. As such, Nas's stories must also withstand intense biographical scrutiny in order to qualify as legitimate. Jay-Z's critiques from the diss record "The Takeover," where he accuses Nas of merely witnessing the ghetto as a spectator rather than "really living it," reflect this sensibility.“ While Jay-Z’s allegations, which allude to Nas's vivid lllmatic narratives (he later references the "Tec on the dresser" from "Represent"), are intended to expose Nas for his alleged lack of authenticity, they also speak to Nas's uncanny ability to accurately represent his surroundings.

Since Nas functions as a black public intellectual, the value of his lyrical narratives cannot be reduced to their coherence with narrow and arbitrary standards of authenticity, but on their ability to relocate previously overlooked stories from the margins to the center of public consciousness. For example, Nas makes a reference in “Halftime” to the “foul cop that shot Garcia." While Nas's lyrics suggest a level of intimacy with the situation that (if we are to believe Jay-Z) he uses to deliberately overstate his ghetto affiliations, the truth of Nas's story is subordinate to its political potential. in fact, an obsession with the "realness" of the narratives (i.e. if Garcia actually existed, whether or not Nas knew him, and if a cop actually shot him) is counterproductive, as it directs attention away from Nas's implicit claims about police brutality as a common feature of urban life.

Skepticism about the stories of the relatively powerless is not restricted to hip-hop culture, as many academics, politicians, and everyday citizens remain wary of individual stories out of deference to dominant (often called "generalizable," "scientific," or “objective") narratives about the world. In the ease of the aforementioned reference to Nas and police brutality, many critics would argue that Nas's individual experiences are atypical and therefore cannot be used to refute accepted claims about the day-to-day practices of police in urban spaces. It is, however, the matter-of-fact manner in which Nas references police brutality (he devotes only one line to the event and does nothing to suggest that it was unusual) that underscores its commonness. By presenting police officers as routinely and unsurprisingly violent, Nas is able to offer an important counter-narrative to the dominant belief that in urban America police are agents of order and justice, rather than terror and repression.

Like many hip—hop artists. Nas's stories are rooted in what Murray Forman calls the “extreme local," which refers to hip-hop culture's focus on specific cities, neighborhoods. area codes, and housing projects. It is through the extreme local that Nas is able to spotlight and humanize ghetto suffering by appending names and faces to otherwise distant and abstract narratives about urban ghettos. Queens, New York, and more specifically the Queensbridge housing projects, is the primary setting for Nas's stories. This narrative commitment to the extreme local is immediately demonstrated in the first verse of "Halftime," where Nas “shouts out" (verbally acknowledges) the “forty side" as “the place that has given me grace.” By locating himself within his neighborhood, Nas is able to engage in what Michael Eric Dyson calls "Africeture," or the practice of people of African descent writing themselves into existence.“ In this case. the residents of Queens and its surrounding area are given narrative life through Nas's rhetorical gestures. The connection between "Africeture" and the "extreme local" is critical for understanding Nas's vocation as a black public intellectual. By placing the lives and experiences of particular communities within the public sphere vis-a-vis his storytelling practices, Nas is able to account for people who historically have been rendered anonymous. Through this act, Nas crafts a new counter-narrative of black existence for his generation.

Despite growing scholarly discussion of the role and function of modern black public intellectuals, little direct attention has been paid to the pedagogical dimensions of their work. As critical educators have argued, pedagogy, the practice of teaching and learning, is not exclusively or even primarily confined to formal schooling or official subjects such as English or mathematics. Instead, the entire social world serves as a classroom in which particular beliefs, values, identities, and stories are sanctioned at the expense of others. Through this broader understanding of education and pedagogy, we are able to understand how public intellectuals function outside of the classroom as public educators for their respective constituencies. There is hardly a better example than Nas, whose work reflects the particular importance of “public pedagogy" for black communities, as well as the unique role of hip-hop artists in articulating and informing public discourse.

Due in large part to the persistence of structures, both legal and de facto, that have limited or completely obstructed their access to quality formal education since slavery, black people have often looked outside of schools for learning. In addition, those who have had the benefit of formal schooling often depend on out-of-school educations in order to earn a “dual degree," or a supplemental education designed to ward off the disingenuous, disempowering, and dehumanizing aspects of the official school curriculum. The sites for black public pedagogy have been various counterpublic spaces such as churches and mosques, barbershops. and black bookstores. Within these locations, black people have been able to share alternate forms of knowledge and affirm their fundamental humanity within relatively safe and supportive communities.