I Gave You Power and a Story: Nas’ Foray into Literature

                After a cursory listen, Nas’ I Gave You Power from the album It Was Written may sound like your everyday rap song.  There is mention of gun fighting, rhyming ‘bloody days’ with ‘bullets spray,’ and unapologetically violent images.  But I Gave You Power is many ways literary prose.
            It is written in the first person from the point of view of a gun.  That itself is a deviation from most rap songs which are about the rapper and the rapper alone.  Nas instead takes on his chosen character with great precision.
            “My body is cold steel for real/I was made to kill/That's why they keep me concealed/Under car seats, they sneak me in clubs/Been in the hands of mad thugs.”
            He goes on to compare the gun’s “body” to our own to strengthen the image.  He describes the clip as his abdomen, and the barrel as his penis. Nas follows Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s advice that details should be exact.  He is fed seventeen bullets, is “seven inches/four pounds” and when the gun meets a “wrecked-up tech,” Nas writes that there are numbers on its chest (the serial number) and gives us every digit. 
            One of Nas’ strengths as a lyricist has always been imagery.  This makes him an ideal candidate to build the bridge from hip-hop to literature. 
            The song’s vivid narrative follows the gun as it changes owners and witnesses several crimes from “Ohio to Little Rock to Canarsie.”  Each verse serves as a chapter with a traditional story arc.  The story is disturbing, utilizing the visceral nature of rap imagery and the violence of guns.
            The power of the lyrics comes from the anthropomorphic firearm’s self reflections.  Written from this perspective, with a touch of magic realism, Nas can promote a non-violent, anti-gun philosophy without sounding preachy. 
            “Beat up and battered/They pull me out I watch as niggaz scattered/Makin’ me kill/But what I feel it never mattered.”
            The story ends with the gun’s decision to stop killing because it is “sick of the blood, sick of the thugs, sick of the wrath of the next man’s grudge.”  It forces itself to jam and the man holding it is killed. 
            The song demonstrates an attitude that literature could use and is an example of how well-crafted a rap song can be.  Most rap is part fiction, part bravado, part born from the streets.  Nas simply finds a way to amplify the fiction part without losing the power of the others.  In the end, I Gave You Power is literature you might hear banging in someone’s car stereo.

SHELFLIFEMAGAZINE : issue #004