Anniversaries: Distant Relatives by Nas & Damian Marley
The project germinated from a simple idea—repurposing unused tracks for an Africa-focused EP, but once they entered the studio, the chemistry kept expanding, ultimately yielding a full album.
Fifteen years on, Distant Relatives feels less like a side-project and more like a linchpin in the vast musical conversation about Black migration, memory, and liberation—an album whose fusion of New York lyricism and Kingston roots still resonates with the urgency of a dispatch from a continent-wide family reunion. The record emerged at a moment when both Nasir Jones and Damian “Jr. Gong” Marley were reassessing their own trajectories and looking outward; today its insistence that hip-hop and reggae are twin limbs of a single diasporic tree situates it beside the most enduring works ever to ponder the routes and roots of the African world.
Their partnership was seeded in 2005, when Nas guested on Marley’s “Road to Zion,” a cut whose blend of martial drums and biblical references hinted that the pair’s chemistry could support a fuller canvas. Over the next few years, they crossed paths on festival bills and charity panels, finding common cause in discussions of African poverty and the legacies of colonialism; by the 2009 Grammy weekend, they were publicly vowing to “build some schools in Africa” with the proceeds of a joint project. Recording began almost immediately, with Marley treating studios in Los Angeles and Miami like open-air workshops—conducting horn sections, layering Nyabinghi drums, and coaxing Jones toward cadences that could ride a one-drop groove without sacrificing Queensbridge grit.
The title they chose underscored the mission: everyone on Earth is a distant relative, yet the album’s laser focus on the Atlantic crossing and its aftermath makes plain that some relations have been forcibly estranged. Interviews from the sessions show the duo trading books on Marcus Garvey and discussing Congolese independence fighters between takes, determined to write songs that would feel as immediate in Lagos as in Brooklyn. Crucially, that intellectual ambition was matched by a philanthropic one: a percentage of royalties was escrowed for educational projects in the Congo, an arrangement that kept the album’s sociology tethered to material outcomes rather than feel-good punditry.
When the campaign began in February 2010, “As We Enter” announced itself with no chorus—just Nas and Damian volleying six-bar salvos over Mulatu Astatke’s Ethio-jazz horn loop, turning the handshake of two MCs into a metaphor for continental kinship. The single was a minor UK hit yet a major statement of intent: brevity, urgency, and a refusal to dilute either accent. “Strong Will Continue” followed, wrapping Marley’s militant riddim around Nas’s meditations on generational sacrifice—the track’s placement in the FIFA World Cup video game slipped its message of resilience into living rooms from Johannesburg to São Paulo. Patience,” built on the Malian desert blues of Amadou & Mariam, stretched six minutes without sagging, a lesson in musical longue durée as a stand-in for cultural survival. Even the pop-leaning “My Generation,” which pairs Lil Wayne’s Auto-Tune drawl with Joss Stone’s soul rasp, frames its optimism in the language of stewardship rather than escapism.
Inside the album, sequencing carries a quasi-narrative arc. “Tribal War” opens with K’naan invoking the Horn of Africa’s guerrilla anthems before Nas flips the phrase “rebel music” into a caution about internecine conflict—a move that foregrounds complexity over slogans. “Leaders” lets Stephen Marley’s falsetto hover over verses that refuse to deify politicians, insisting that real leadership is communal —a sentiment echoed in the spiraling guitar lines reminiscent of South African mbaqanga. From there, the record dives into friendship’s fragile economics on “Friends,” where a sampled Angolan protest song crackles beneath one of Nas’s sharpest middle-age verses. “Count Your Blessings” flips that tension, cataloguing everyday indignities—water outages, orphanages—yet landing on gratitude, its refrain riding a dub-wise bassline that feels equal parts Kingston and Lagos.
“Disappear,” perhaps the album’s emotional nadir, imagines Black genius evaporating in a world that monetizes the culture yet ignores the bodies that create it; Marley’s minor-key melodica drifts like funeral incense while Nas’s voice frays at the edge of exasperation. The mood lifts with “Land of Promise,” which grafts Dennis Brown’s righteous tenor onto a re-voiced version of his 1979 roots classic—an intergenerational duet that literalizes the album’s thesis that reggae and rap are alternate dialects of the same historical speech. “Nah Mean” is the closest thing to a cypher, barking slogans over a Guinea-Bissau vocal sample and reminding us that resistance sometimes requires repetition rather than exposition. Closer “Africa Must Wake Up,” again with K’naan, stretches past eight minutes, building from whispered history lessons to a choral crescendo that feels designed for stadium lights—and for classrooms funded by the album’s revenue.
Throughout, Marley’s production is deliberately analog-leaning: live percussion tracked through vintage microphones, horns recorded in the round, guitar skanks left slightly behind the beat to mimic field-recorded high-life. Nas, renowned for the dense internal rhymes of Illmatic, adapts by elongating vowels and allowing patois inflections to color his cadence; the result is a vocal interplay that dissolves notions of genre orthodoxy without begging for crossover. The commercial metrics were healthy, debuting at No. 5 on the Billboard 200 and topping rap, R&B, and reggae charts simultaneously, but more telling was the global tour that followed, routing through Bonnaroo, Paris Hip-Hop Festival, and eventually African dates that folded the music back into the landscape that birthed it.
That itinerary, coupled with the documented disbursement of funds toward Congolese schooling initiatives, ensured the album’s politics did not stall at rhetoric. In classrooms built from those proceeds, local bands have covered “Leaders,” and footage of teenagers in Goma rapping Nas’s verses circulates online—a small but concrete circle of cultural exchange that many celebrity charity singles have failed to achieve. Such afterlives bolster the argument that Distant Relatives sits comfortably beside earlier musical treatises on diaspora: Bob Marley’s Exodus, which framed spiritual migration as a tactic of survival; Fela Kuti’s Zombie, whose scorching Afrobeat mocked militarism while galvanizing pan-African solidarity; and Ms. Lauryn Hill’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, which remixed classroom pedagogy into a soundtrack for self-determination. Each of those records forged a vocabulary for autonomy within oppression, and each did so by refusing to segregate politics from groove—an approach Nas and Damian inherit and extend through hip-hop’s sample-built memory and reggae’s drum-and-bass heartbeat.
The album’s endurance also lies in its contradictions: Nas’s occasional conspiracy-tinged asides brush against Marley’s utopian optimism, creating a dialectic that mirrors the diaspora’s own debates about reckoning versus reconciliation. Fifteen years later, those tensions feel prophetic: global protests over state violence, waves of climate-driven migration, and a Black Atlantic art scene more interconnected than ever all echo the album’s insistence that prosperity and trauma travel together across borders. Younger artists—GoldLink, for instance, titling an LP Diaspora, Christian Scott naming a jazz suite “Diaspora,” and even drill MCs sampling Amadou & Mariam—work in a field that Distant Relatives helped till.
Ultimately the record’s most lasting achievement may be the way it collapses ancestral distance into something intimate: when Nas spits “Only thing we inherit: disease and hatred,” and Marley counters with “We need love to raise our babies,” they enact a conversation that could be taking place at any Caribbean cookout or Harlem block party—two cousins in disagreement yet united by blood and beat. In 2025, the album plays less like a period piece than a field guide, its hand drums and breakbeats mapping routes from Addis Ababa to Port of Spain to Crown Heights, reminding listeners that the Atlantic is wide but the family it scattered is wider still.