OK, so the hoopla surrounding Untitled is dramatically over-the-top. But none of it even matters if the music itself doesn't address the issues used to promote the record. Nas wisely avoids looking like a hypocrite with this smart collection of 15 tracks, which, although they don't actually offer any solutions to the racial and social problems that exist in America, address them with immaculately clever wordplay and intelligent themes for an album's worth of commentary from a contemplated perspective.Untitled begins with a Jay Electronica-produced track "Queens Get the Money," which sets the record's dark tone with its skeleton beat based on a lone repeating piano riff. Nas overcrowds the track with dense rhymes, rapping mind-twisting lyrics like, "Hip-hop was aborted, so Nas breathes life back into the embryo / Let us make men in our image, spit it, I'm Huey P and Louis V at the eulogy throwing Molotov's for Emmet."
If you didn't get all the references in those rhymes, chances are this album might not be for you, considering all the tracks on Untitled are as lyrically complex as those lines and even more politically charged. Songs like "America" and "N.*.*.*.*.*. (The Slave and The Master)" tackle racial stereotypes head on by detailing life in the ghetto and critiquing the typical American lifestyle. Nas even goes in hard on Fox News and the media on "Sly Fox," spitting back the venom that they threw his way during the promotion of this album.