Instead, Nas (Def Jam ***) is a solid but unspectacular album that largely comes across as an honest effort to spur constructive conversation on racial issues, but suffers at times from soggy beats and self-congratulation.

Not that Nas is without some slick production moves. There's "Fried Chicken," a collaboration with Busta Rhymes and Amy Winehouse producer Mark Ronson that crackles with energy and wit. And on the spare and haunting opener "Queens Got the Money," Nas hooks up with knob-twiddler Jay Electronica and boasts, "I'm over their heads like a bulimic on a see-saw."

Elsewhere he contemplates race relations over soul-funk grooves, making reference, in "You Can't Stop Us Now," to Crispus Attucks, James Baldwin and Betsy Ross, who, he suspects, "had a n- with her to help" sew the first American flag.

On "N.I.*.*.E.R (The Slave and the Master)," he rejects the word as a malicious label hung on African Americans: "Still we choose to ignore the obvious / Man this history don't acknowledge us."

And on "Y'all My Ni**as" he defends his right to use the word as he pleases and speaks on the impossibility of ever doing away with it: "Try to erase me from ya'll memory / Too late, I'm engraved in history."

Those two approaches might seem contradictory, but they come off as earnest attempts to grapple with difficult issues of racial identity. And Nas is on firmer ground when he's thinking them through in song than when he's making pop concessions such as "Hero" or the out-of-place Chris Brown hook-up "Make the World Go Round."