Count Your Blessings is one of the most uplifting songs I can think of, reminding the listener that even when times are tough, you should always be thankful for the things that you do have. This made me pay special attention to the lyrics of the verses, and I began to pick up subtleties that I had not picked up on before.Īnother theme on this album is hope, and there were two tracks on Distant Relatives that evoked strong feelings of hope for me. The beat was trance like, with Miriams gentle voice echoing on the chorus. They used the sample, and did it a lot of justice. Then I heard Amadou and Mariam’s song when I served in Mali for the Peace Corps, and I was blown away. I had heard this song when I first listened to the album, and even though I liked it, it was not an instant favorite. Patience uses a sample from the famous Malian duo Amadou and Mariam’s song Sabali.
This leads me to one of my favorite track on the album, Patience. We hear K’naan spitting some raps in his native language which was pretty cool. K’naan makes another appearance at the end of the album on the final track Africa Must Wake Up, which is an uplifting song about how the future is bright for Africa despite some dark days ahead. K’naan from Somalia, Nas from NY, and Damian from Jamaica can all trace their ancestry to the continent of Africa, which is why the addition of the African beats into the album was a great concept. This song also made the connection of the album title, because we are all distant relatives. This song spoke about the need for humans to divide ourselves into tribes, and engage in conflict. The track introduced an African theme that would be present through much of the album. I had actually first learned about K’naan back in 2007 when he opened for Stephen and Damian Marley on the Mind Control tour. The next song on the track on the album, Tribal War, had the albums first guest feature from an up and coming Somalian rapper named K’naan. It was a party track that got the album off to a fast start, yet really didn’t have the light lyrics to match the uptempo beat. You could tell that they were speaking as a voice of their respective communities that were so distant in proximity to one another, yet so similar in nuanced ways. From the opening track, As We Enter, it was clear that there would be a back and forth between the two MC’s over bass heavy beats. That is why I found it so strange that he was able to contribute to an album that proved that hip-hop was not only alive, it was growing in new and exciting ways. When Distant Relatives came out, it was at a time when people, including Nas, had claimed that hip-hop was dead. Both are artists that are at the top of their field, revolutionizing their genres. Damian has won a few Grammy’s for his albums The Halfway Tree and Welcome to Jamrock. Damian Marley is the son of reggae legend Bob Marley, and brings an uptempo rhythm to reggae music.
For those of you who are not familiar with either artist, Nas is regarded as one of the best rap lyricists of all time, hailing from Queens, New York, where he began recording conscious rap music in 1994. It is such as perfect fusion of the two genres, that I have a hard time calling it a hip-hop album as it could just as easily be a reggae album with rap verses. It was the most innovative mix of rap and reggae that I have ever heard. In 2010, a fusion album dropped that would change the way I viewed hip-hop fusion albums, that album was Distant Relatives by Nas and Damian Marley.