{"id":2983,"date":"2011-08-02T09:28:01","date_gmt":"2011-08-02T16:28:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/?p=2983"},"modified":"2011-08-02T09:30:03","modified_gmt":"2011-08-02T16:30:03","slug":"nas-damian-marley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/2011\/08\/nas-damian-marley\/","title":{"rendered":"NAS & DAMIAN MARLEY"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/h1>\n

NAS & DAMIAN MARLEY<\/strong><\/h1>\n

Giants of rap and reggae find common roots in the musical family tree<\/span><\/h2>\n
\n

Scarcely a hip-hop or reggae album is released these days without a roster of guest performances by stars or hot up-and-comers, but full-length album collaborations are rare. That fact only made the prospect of teaming up for Distant Relatives<\/em>, their new genre-blending album, more of an enticement for reggae singer Damian \u201cJr. Gong\u201d Marley and veteran\u00a0rapper Nas.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a collection of songs that seeks to view the challenges of the world through the lens of the troubled continent of Africa, an endeavor that both men say involved a powerful creative experience\u2014and a pretty good time. \u201cIt was a very fun thing to do,\u201d says Marley, the youngest son of reggae icon Bob Marley. Nas (born Nasir Jones) had worked with Marley once before, rhyming on the song \u201cRoad to Zion\u201d from Marley\u2019s 2005 breakthrough, Welcome to Jamrock<\/em>. \u201cI said on \u2018Road to Zion,\u2019 \u2018I\u2019ve been waiting to do this song with you,\u2019\u201d says Nas, the son of jazz musician Olu Dara. \u201cI had heard some of his music before, and when we worked on \u2018Road,\u2019 we locked in and talked about working some more.\u201d Recalls Marley, \u201cI said, \u2018Great, I can\u2019t see anything wrong with doing that.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The pair holed up with Marley\u2019s band in studios in Los Angeles and Miami to try recording together, and a project initially envisioned as an EP blossomed into\u00a0a full-length album. Marley served as producer for Distant Relatives<\/em>, and\u00a0proceeds from sales will go to charity. We spoke recently with Marley and Nas, who\u00a0will be touring together through at least\u00a0August, about this very special meeting\u00a0of minds.<\/p>\n

How did you decide that now was the time to make this record?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Nas: It\u2019s like it always was supposed to happen. You listen to what D talks about\u00a0in a lot of his music and what I talk about\u00a0in a lot of my music, and the only thing that\u2019s surprising about it to me is that\u00a0it\u2019s two different artists from two different genres doing an album together. Other than that, we talk similar shit.<\/p>\n

How did you break the ice?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Marley: We would sit and play music. We listened to some tracks, some stuff we\u2019d been working on, some stuff I grew up listening to, some stuff he grew up listening to, smoke a few joints.<\/p>\n

How did you go about figuring out how the album should sound? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Nas: I wanted our<\/em> sound, whatever that was going to be. We had the opportunity to start from scratch, with Damian as the producer. We wanted to go our own direction and put the reggae in there, put a little hip-hop in there. But we wanted to add different things, too, so that it\u2019s not all reggae, not all hip-hop.<\/p>\n

Marley: We didn\u2019t want it to sound typical, like what you\u2019d expect from one of my albums or one of Nas\u2019 albums. We wanted to create an album where you could see there was common ground, but that still had a new sound to it. That was the only thing I was concerned about in approaching the music. Other than that, it was all about feel and whatever felt good.<\/p>\n

Africa is a recurring theme. Why?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Marley: I had one or two tracks I had been working on before we started working on this project, and they were songs based around Africa. So when the idea for the EP came up, those were the first songs we were thinking of using. It\u2019s one of the things I love about Nas\u2019 music: He always mentions Africa. And of course we do it in reggae music all the time, too, so that\u2019s one of the things I really have in common with Nas. Africa is the cradle of civilization, the cradle of humanity. And on the whole, it\u2019s the biggest example of a place that needs help. Even though we\u2019re speaking specifically about Africa, we\u2019re really talking about humanity in general.<\/p>\n

So is this a socially conscious record?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Nas: I don\u2019t know, man. When you get in the studio with someone like D, we don\u2019t think about that: Is it socially conscious, is it political, is it pro-Africa, is it pro-people? It\u2019s probably all those things, but the point was that we go in there and say what we had in our heads, what we were concerned with and what we were feeling.<\/p>\n

How did your collaborative process work in the studio? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Nas: D put the tracks together and put the music together. He had a lot of ideas, so I would jump in and we\u2019d talk about songs. We just started writing. We\u00a0did all the songs together. We didn\u2019t fly stuff around, we just got down with\u00a0each other.<\/p>\n

Marley: We did a lot of jamming. The musicians and I would jam together and we came up with a few ideas that way. Some of the tracks are programmed, so not every track is live. But it was a very creative,\u00a0very experimental approach in the\u00a0studio\u2014very free. We tried a lot of new things, a lot of sounds and feels. We had many more ideas that we didn\u2019t develop any further than the jam sessions, so they\u2019re not on the album.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs We Answer\u201d was written and recorded on the spot. How did that track come together the way it did? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Marley: The experience of working on that song was great. Nas and I were going back and forth very intricately, like every two lines it changed between us. We got in the booth together and we were feeding off each other\u2019s energy to write the song that way, which I\u2019ve never done with another person. I\u2019ve done collaborations, of course, and I\u2019ve written songs in terms of it coming off the top of my head and tweaking it after, but not at the same time like that.<\/p>\n

Nas: We got in the vocal booth and just went in on it.<\/p>\n

What did you learn from working with each other?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Marley: You learn all different things about the person as a friend. For example, Nas has a crazy vocabulary. So I learned all these different words just being around him, because his vocabulary is bananas.<\/p>\n

Nas: This man is serious, he\u2019s dedicated to what he\u2019s talking about. He has a mission\u2014a few missions\u2014he has goals, and he\u2019s disciplined. That\u2019s hard to come by. I find myself needing discipline.<\/p>\n

You\u2019re planning to give some proceeds of the album to charity. How did you decide to do that? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Nas: We\u2019re going to send some to the motherland, we\u2019re going to send some to our hometowns. We\u2019re going to do what we can. We definitely want to do something, because life is about each one, teach one. Everybody needs to look out for each other, especially in this time and age. The world has definitely been made smaller through technology, so now we\u2019ve got to get tighter.<\/p>\n

\u2013Eric R. Danton<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NAS & DAMIAN MARLEY Giants of rap and reggae find common roots in the musical family tree Scarcely a hip-hop or reggae album is released these days without a roster of guest performances by stars or hot up-and-comers, but full-length album collaborations are rare. That fact only made the prospect of teaming up for Distant […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[70,2269,970],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2983"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2983"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2983\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2986,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2983\/revisions\/2986"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}