Did you know that Michael Eric Dyson was writing a book based solely on Nas' Illmatic? "Why for?" you ponder. Well, Illmatic is the "greatest Hip Hop album ever" and the main work Nas fans call upon when qualifying whatever new madness Nas is getting into. Fourteen years later and we're still patting the brother on the back for that one album. Of the book, Dyson says "Every song on Illmatic will be analyzed, interpreted and then re-articulated in a kind of intellectual sense from his own base in Hip Hop and we're trying to deal with that seriously." Good lord. The sooner this doesn't happen the better. Everytime Dyson opens his mouth to speak on Hip Hop I literally feel like he's reading from one of those books that philosophizes Seinfeld, or The Simpsons. Not that Hip Hop (especially Nas' early-'90s brand) isn't worthy of the re-interpretation, but Dyson just really tends to go overboard with the vocab. This book will be 50,000 pages. [HHDX/AHH]
