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BILLY X. SUNDAY reviews the album release party from the sidewalk outside of the club.

The album release party for NaS’ latest CD reminded me of NYC years past, when spots like NV, The Tunnel and the Red Zone were packed to capacity. Chicks would be wearing their highest heels and dudes would be rocking their crispiest I.T.’s. NaS’ parties were always some ghetto fabulous shit. Just like Biggie’s and Jay’s and Puffy’s events, but NaS’ joints would be more filled with regular people looking their best, not just dressed up entertainment industry people.

Last night was one of those events where a chickenhead becomes cordon bleu and a duckmouth turns into foie gras, but only for a night. Tomorrow everyone becomes themselves again. I love sidewalk pimping at these events. Frankly, I think you are losing by going inside the club unless there is an open bar, and even then who needs that if you brought your own booze, which I did. I’ve spent the last twenty five years of my life getting into some ridiculous parties and standing outside of some banana head joints. At the end of the day I have a good time since I bring my own fun.

Women are getting sluttier now that I am getting older. Even though we are in a recession there seems to be no shortage of groupies at the high profile events. At the live rap show I went to the other night there were ladies all around but they weren’t heavily made up and most of them had on sneakers. At the NaS party I thought I was peeping Kelis clones all around me. The difference between NaS and Kelis, and say Jay and BeYonce, or even J.D. and Janet is that NaS and Kelis are accessible. That and the fact that NaS actually HAS sex with Kelis as opposed to simply being photographed in her vicinity.

The question of whether NaS album is any good has already been answered. He won’t outsell Wayne but he will have a modest sales total by the end of the summer. At the end of the day one good NaS track pwns Lil’ Wayne’s entire catalog. Most other rapper’s catalog for that matter. I haven’t been that impressed with the album tracks that I have heard while the Nigger mixtape was exciting and filled with potential. NaS is such an enigma as a recoding artist. He is clearly a genius on several levels, but then he becomes an idiot savant during interviews.

If Tupac were concerned more about being a provacative lyricist than simply being provacative he would have been NaS. There aren’t too many rappers left that can express all the facets of the ghetto experience. Not just our desire to have luxury, but the humanity that the most enlightened ghetto dwellers seek to achieve. How to be one with the planet and one with yourself was stripped from the Native Americans via systemic genocide and it was removed from the Africans that arrived in the Americas via the whip and those who cracked it, white and Black. My father told me that there were some Blacks that couldn’t wait to get their hands on the whip. They would be the most forceful crackers of all time.

We still have Blacks that can’t wait to get their hands on the whip. Testify to the killers of Sean Bell. We still have Blacks that can’t wait to get their hands on a new whip, because the ’07 joints are a year old now. I know I was talking about that NaS album release party that I couldn’t get into and I know I should be talking about his new album, but I am still drunk from all the rum that I snuck into the premiere of The Dark Knight. Yooooooooo, that was some hardbody shit. Definitely go see that shit like right now. It’s 3am party people, do you know where your children are?