On September 6, 2007, Nas performed at a free concert for the Virginia Tech student body and faculty, following the school shooting there. Nas’s management worried that the album would not be sold by chain stores such as Wal-Mart, thus limiting its distribution. On the opposite side of the spectrum, many of the most famous names in the entertainment industry expressed a sense of trust in Nas for using the racial epithet as the title of his full-length LP.
Additionally, Fort Greene, Brooklyn assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries requested New York’s Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli to withdraw $84,000,000 from the state pension fund that has been invested into Universal and its parent company, Vivendi, if the album’s title was not changed. Controversy escalated as the album’s impending release date drew nearer, going as far as to spark rumors that Def Jam was planning to drop Nas unless he changed the title. Both progressive commentators, such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, and the conservative-aligned news channel Fox News were outraged Jackson called on entertainers to stop using the epithet after comedian Michael Richards used it onstage in late 2006. On October 12, 2007, Nas announced that his next album would be called Nigger. Nas created a style of rapping that was more conversational than ever before”. Kool Moe Dee notes that Nas has an “off-beat conversational flow” in his book There’s a God on the Mic – he says: “before Nas, every MC focused on rhyming with a cadence that ultimately put the words that rhymed on beat with the snare drum. His catalog includes songs narrated before birth (‘Fetus’) and after death (‘Amongst Kings’), biographies (‘UBR ’) and autobiographies (‘Doo Rags’), allegorical tales (‘Money Is My Bitch’) and epistolary ones (‘One Love’), he’s rapped in the voice of a woman (‘Sekou Story’) and even of a gun (‘I Gave You Power’).” Robert Christgau writes that “Nas has been transfiguring since Illmatic”. In his book Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop (2009), writer Adam Bradley states, “Nas is perhaps contemporary rap’s greatest innovator in storytelling. Nas has been praised for his ability to create a “devastating match between lyrics and production” by journalist Peter Shapiro, as well as creating a “potent evocation of life on the street”, and he has even been compared to Rakim for his lyrical technique. During late 2009, Nas used his live band Mulatto with music director Dustin Moore for concerts in Europe and Australia. Nas also revealed that he would begin working on his tenth studio album following the release of Distant Relatives. The Los Angeles Times reported that the album would be titled Distant Relatives. He went on to say that it was “too early to tell the title or anything like that”. A portion of the profit was planned to go towards building a school in Africa. I’d worked with people before from the reggae world but when I worked with Damian, the whole workout was perfect”.
I always liked how reggae and hip-hop have always been intertwined and always kind of pushed each other, I always liked the connection. His stuff is not really singing, or if he does, it comes off more hard, like on some street shit. Nas said of the collaboration in an interview “I was a big fan of his father and of course all the children, all the offspring, and Damian, I kind of looked at Damian as a rap guy. At the 2009 Grammy Awards, Nas confirmed he was collaborating on an album with reggae singer Damian Marley which was expected to be released in late 2009.