“It’s nineteen ninety-now, and there’s certain individuals who swear they rollin’ hard and get robbed on principle.”
-mos def
It took a little while for the whole Nas/ Kelis thing sink in for me. I don’t know how much money the god Nasir makes, but regardless, I think that 40K a month for child support is about as raw a deal as you can get. But I don’t think NaS is paying out the ass just for child support. NaS is paying $40K a month for re-creating the “Pumps in a Bump” video {||] at what looks like a drug lord’s house and for spitting Cristal at cameras with Puffy. He’s paying for tales of killing Brazilian models with crushed-up glass after murking her NFL running back husband and running off with $12.5 million. How else can you explain that Russell Simmons’s child support settlement is the exact same amount -only its $20K for each kid? And how do you explain the Canadian billionaire whose child support payment for 3 kids is “only” $35K a month? Last week, the billionaire’s Brazilian baby momma asked for a lump sum of $50 million plus $56K/ month and the courts told her to go kick rocks. Aight it’s Canada, but still. Russell and this dude’s money is a lot longer than NaS’s. And the judge had to be aware of NaS’s cash and assets as not to produce a ruling out of complete thin air. The problem is that the judge doesn’t get it.
Rap’s tightrope walk with WWF (WWE?) status has a lot of people fooled. That judge might be one of them. Rap music’s displays of excess gives the impression that these dudes have cash to burn, literally. So while the judge might have seen the numbers, he gave judgment on the lifestyle. I’m not trying to equate NaS’s floss with T-Pain’s coontastic Big Ass Chain floss, but I can see how it’s very easy for outsiders to blur them together. Not to mention, even though rap has gone mainstream, the torch bearing mob that went on a rap witchhunt in the 80’s and 90’s never went away. What better way to put a rapper nigger in his place than to hit him with an egregious child support settlement? Plus it had the effect of making cats take pause. Kelis ethered NaS, but rap music, painting itself in broad strokes of fiction has wounded another one of the greats.
