N- again: Those 6 letters

"We are committed to ending hate - word and talk. It doesn't do anyone any good, whether it's a journalist on TV, or a rapper on the radio."

- The Rev. Wendell Anthony, on why the Detroit chapter of the NAACP symbolically buried the N-word, July 2007

"It is absolutely silly and unproductive to have a funeral for the word n-, when the actions continue. We need to have a movement to resurrect brothers and sisters, not a funeral for n-. 'Cause n- don't die."

- Abiodun Oyewole of the Last Poets on "Project Roach," on Nas' new album, "Nas," July 2008

It's the word that won't go away.

On Tuesday, the acclaimed and controversy-seeking rapper Nas finally released his new album, which he had announced would be named after the word.

Nigger.

The word that's been employed by Mark Twain and Richard Pryor for artful purposes. The word that was spat out in a 2006 racist tirade by Seinfeld stand-up comedian Michael Richards. The word that many have sought to ban, including Jesse Jackson - who was overheard this month using it to criticize Barack Obama during a break from a Fox News interview.

In October, Nas said the title would take the form that ends with -a, the way Halle Berry used it to pay Warren Beatty the ultimate compliment in Bulworth. The form that's "a term of endearment," in the words of hip-hop-quoting author Michael Eric Dyson, "used in opposition to how the white culture was using it."

But Nas - the 34-year-old rapper born Nasir Jones, the son of jazz trumpeter Olu Dara - thought that wasn't incendiary enough. The esteemed MC raised in New York's Queensbridge housing projects has been one of the most highly regarded lyricists in hip-hop since his debut Illmatic - ranked as one of the greatest rap albums of all time - came out in 1994, when he was just 19.

So in putting together the follow-up to his confrontational 2006 album Hip-Hop Is Dead, he announced he'd be ending it with the more explosive -er, the form of the word that, as linguist Geoffrey Nunberg says, "trails its history of hate and violence into the room."

That term would also trail its history into retailers such as Best Buy and Target, where most CDs are sold. In May, Nas acknowledged to MTV News that he was feeling the heat: "Record stores are going to have a problem in this day and time selling a record with that title."

Last month, his label, Def Jam, announced that the album's title would be another N-word: Nas. And one of Nas' most provocative new songs - "Be a N- Too," which was expected to be the album's first single and which borrows its tune from the Dr Pepper jingle - is not included on the CD. (The album does, however, include a surprisingly hopeful Obama endorsement called "Black President" and a pointed attack on a cable news network in "Sly Fox.")

"Be a N- Too" is missed, because it echoed the indictment of racism in Lenny Bruce's 1960s stand-up routine, in which the trailblazing comedian repeated every taboo racial slur he could think of to show "it's the suppression of the word that gives it the power, the violence, the viciousness."

Four and a half decades later, the debate over the word still rages. On Princeton University professor Cornel West's 2007 CD of words and music Never Forget: A Journey of Revelations, he debates Dyson on the subject of the N-word.

The pop-culture-savvy West, who has made cameo appearances in Matrix movies, worries that "millions of young brothers and sisters use the word, and that self-hatred is more deeply internalized."

But, he said in a phone call, "Nas is a towering artist. I support his artistic freedom, and his deep love for black people and for justice, I think, permits him to use any word he wants to use. It's a little different than nonenlightened folk with bigoted views."

Nunberg, who comments about language for NPR's Philadelphia-based Fresh Air and teaches at the University of California-Berkeley, calls the N-word "the strongest and most axiomatic case of a small collection of racial and ethnic slurs that have achieved a new status in recent years. Words associated with a history of racism that is still very vivid and still operative."

The N-word, Nunberg says, is an especially potent "reclaimed epithet" whose usage is considered allowable only within the group to whom it applies. One of the ways in which the N-word is a special case is its omnipresence in popular culture. "One reason for blacks to avoid using it is that it's used by whites to justify using it. 'They say it.' You hear whites defending it that way."

The battle is fought by hip-hoppers as well as academics. Last year, Russell Simmons of the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network recommended that the word, along with vulgarities such as bitch and ho, be voluntarily removed, bleeped or deleted by the recording and broadcast industries. 50 Cent called the proposed title of the Nas album "stupid."

But leading "conscious" rapper Lupe Fiasco, in an interview this year, praised Nas' name for his album, calling it "a great idea, honestly. The word n- is the history of the United States of America. Economically, for instance. The word n- derives from a term directed at a slave. Slaves built this country. . . . 400 years of free labor.

"Certainly people are rich right now because their great-great-great-grandfathers' fortunes were built on the back of those n-. So along with the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, there should be a piece of paper just with the word n- written on it. Because that word speaks so much to the prejudice and the racism of the history of this country. Just in that one word."

On the liner notes to Nas, the rapper writes: " 'Ni**er' or 'ni**a,' not even the lesser evil 'negro,' could never be our title. . . . Ni**er is a word that comes out of the horrible African American slave trade. That slave trade is a massive part of American history but people want to sweep it under the rug like it never existed. . . . So sad we Americans are."

Nas' critics are skeptical. Hip-hop lyrics "aren't revolutionary or constructive," says John McWhorter, the Mount Airy-bred author of All About the Beat: Why Hip-Hop Can't Save Black America. "What they are is antiauthoritarian."

"Given that in 2006 and 2007 there was a good deal of debate over the word that I'm allowed to say because I'm black. . . . How can you be antiauthoritarian now? What button are you going to push? If you predicted what somebody would have called their album in 2008, wouldn't it have been N-?"

The point of putting out an album by that name, McWhorter says, "is people will complain, and he'll be censored, and then he'll have a track in which he complains about being censored." Indeed, Nas does just that, lamely, on "Hero": "Still in musical prison, in jail for the flow / Try telling Bob Dylan, Bruce, or Billy Joel they can't sing what's in their soul."

McWhorter stresses he's "not appalled" by profanity-strewn hip-hop, and is a fan. "But the idea that this upturned middle finger is the height of wisdom when it comes to thinking about what ails black America - it just isn't true."

Saul Williams didn't attempt to go as far as Nas. The African American poet and rocker titled his album, released in the fall on the Internet and this month in stores, The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust.

"That's because the word n- is abhorrent and hateful, but niggy is cute," he says. "I wanted to show how we could take something that is hateful . . . and transform it through art into something that was clever, something that was thought-provoking."

Williams doesn't think niggy's heinous linguistic cousin should be done away with, either. "I know that when they do inoculations against diseases they usually inject the disease into us," he says. "I'm not so sure it would benefit us to forget the poison. To forget the oppression."

Nas' inability to title his album what he intended "shows you that the marketplace is real," Williams says. "I wouldn't say that Nas failed. Because I think what Nas wanted to do was point out the surrealness of the uproar surrounding that term. And having the album untitled with his back showing those rip marks? To me, that has n- all over it."