Olu
Dara has been celebrated for his sideman recordings with avant-garde jazz
artists, like David Murray, and his own sessions that are deeply steeped in the
blues. Yet, far more people have heard him work on Nas’s “Life’s a Bitch.” He
had the inside track to that gig. He happens to be the rapper’s father. Nasir
bin Olu Dara Jones will take one bow after another in One9’s shamelessly
celebratory Nas: Time is Illmatic (trailer here), which opens this
Wednesday in New York.
If
you were going to write a generic rapper creation myth, it might go something
like this: The sensitive son of a politically conscious but largely absent
father grows up in a hostile big city environment, largely keeping on the
straight and narrow, thanks to his strong mother. Yet, just as the young man is
about to make it big, his close friend and musical collaborator falls prey to
the urban pathologies they hoped to escape. Nevertheless, the grieving friend’s
destiny would not be denied.
That
is pretty much the Nas story in a nutshell. Since that is what happened, One9
is stuck with the general arc, but a good documentarian’s challenge is to delve
beneath the surface to find the surprising and idiosyncratic things that make
their subjects tick. Unfortunately, One9 and writer Erik Parker are content to
print the legend, chronicling a publicist approved narrative that might as well
be cribbed from AllMusic.com. Even for a Nas fan, the results are rather boring
to watch.
Yes,
Nas’s Illmatic album was a hip-hop
watershed. We know that because scores of talking heads tell us so, but they
never really explain it. Some vaguely suggest he broke new ground in his politicized
depiction of inner city life, yet we hear plenty of rhymes similarly addressing
issues of race and class from his early 1980s contemporaries. Frankly, there is
not a lot of analysis in Time—just a
general assumption everyone is already on the same side of the mountain.
Still,
Time could be an efficiently
inebriating drinking game. Just take one sip for every time he shakes hands,
fist bumps, or high fives someone from the old neighborhood. While these scenes
are obviously meant to emphasis Nas’s close connection to Queensbridge, we just
so get it after the first fifteen or twenty times.
