Rediscovered: Nas and Damian Marley’s ‘Distant Relatives’

They might not always look or sound the same, but hip-hop and Jamaican music were never distant relatives. More like first cousins. Before he ever emigrated from Kingston, Jamaica to the Bronx, DJ Kool Herc had already internalized the call-and-response electricity of bashments and sound clashes. Those elements, along with classic James Brown records, were the structural DNA of the famous Herc block party that birthed hip-hop 53 years ago. As rappers infused intermittent toasting and spurts of reggae chants with their songs, the connection grew even stronger throughout the ’90s. But it was never rendered with the clarity of Distant Relatives, a joint album between Nas and Damian “Jr. Gong” Marley, son of reggae icon Bob Marley. Released 16 years ago, the LP crystallized a synergy that began before hip-hop even existed. 

At 14 tracks and over an hour long, Distant Relatives cross-pollinates Nas’ customary sociopolitical rhymes with Marley’s serrated melodies and reggae fusion soundscapes from his brother, Stephen. At its best, it fuses Marley’s visceral rebelliousness with Nas’ technical dexterity for tracks that feel both universal and culturally specific. The diaspora is both the playground and the battlefield. For “As We Enter,” Escobar and Marley cruise over an Ethiopian jazz sample for a classic self-mythology fest: “Break past the anchor, we come to conquer / Man a badman, we no play Willy Wonka,” raps Marley, before Nas says he’s got the guns and Marley reminds you he’s got the ganja. It’s a propulsive setup for Nas bars that tell you they’re ready for war or peace: “And we could blaze it up on your block if you wanna.” 

Interpolating Little Roy’s “Tribal War,” Nas and Marley get pensive as they examine racial conflicts. While Damian gets more philosophical, Nas leans literal, broadly dissecting the chain of events that ended with free men in chains. Paired with a faded choral group, Marley’s stern vocals, and tribal percussion, it plays out like a seance for the ghosts of African slavery. Ambient, yet cuttingly incisive, it’s a track that condemns patterns and a past that continues to affect the present. On tracks like their Dennis Brown-interpolating “Land of Promise,” they imagine a future that could, in an ideal world, be right now. 

For the track, Marley distills images of a pan-African dreamscape through jagged hymns from Kingston: “Imagine Ghana like California with Sunset Boulevard / Johannesburg would be Miami / Somalia like New York.” Blended with skanking guitar melodies, it feels like a Jamaican embassy sitting in the heart of Africa, with Nas dropping by in the role of a diplomat. 

Though Nas and Marley excavate power from sorrow and transformation, they also make time to find peace in gratitude. On tracks like “Count Your Blessings,” Marley finds serenity in a sunshine-drenched, island-inflected soundscape. And the casual gift of good health insurance. For his part, Nas gives one of his typically solemn lessons in perspective: “You're keeping your composure like Gershwin / Songs by Earth, Wind, keep you in a zone writing verses / So when your pockets light, know that you have a heavy purpose.” 

The concept of “purpose” is one that threads Nas, Damian Marley and the Black musical diaspora. Marley’s strained, yet piercing cries are distinctly reggae, and the content itself, and even the delivery, feel like cousins of the Negro spiritual. Songs designed to uplift in times of upheaval. Nas’ rap rhythms might be more directly comparable to The Last Poets than DJ Kool Herc’s, but his core formula is rooted in Jamaican tradition — there is no MCing if there’s no toasting. 

While parts of it can scan platitudinous and some of the rhetoric can be didactic (“Count Your Blessings,” “Africa Must Wake Up”), Distant Relatives is a cultural reunion that doubled as the best kind of course correction — a head-on collision at the heart of the Black soul.