Kalecrunch
New member
than those who were restricted to radio and record stores—a kid can listen exclusively to nineties hip-hop in New York City without ever turning on Hot 97—but that didn’t explain the moments when Droog sounded like Nas when the latter addressed his fans. Why, for example, would an unknown m.c. say, “Making like four more albums then I’m falling back” when he hadn’t even released one? And why would he choose to write so many of his rhymes in the past tense, as if his career had already happened? (Droog’s response: “I feel old, man.”) I confronted Droog with the litany of evidence that he was Nas, including an analysis of his EP cover. (The first two tracks are “Quiet Storm” and “Bad to the Bone”—the first two letters spell out “QB,” or Queensbridge, where Nas grew up. Also, the acknowledgments thank Tim Dog, the m.c. who some believe faked his own death.) And when I brought up a literary deconstruction of the word droog, which appears throughout “A Clockwork Orange” as an example of the Nadsat language (Nadsat rearranged is “dat Nas”), Droog said, “People are really crazy.”
Perhaps the most convincing evidence of the Droog-as-Nas theory is the absence of evidence. Every aspiring struggle rapper has a Twitter profile—with roughly two hundred thousand tweets and four hundred followers—an Instagram account, and a SoundCloud page. Presumably, one would be able to track Droog back to the days before his EP and find evidence that would prove that he was not Nas. Droog, indeed, does have a Twitter account (he claims that his manager made him get one), but the timeline starts in June of this year. He also had seemingly resisted that other traceable habit of rising m.c.s: talking shit to other rappers through YouTube. (A slightly more thorough search, however, reveals a handful of response videos from other amateur m.c.s to Droog’s old alias, Grandma on Drums.) With this evidential vacuum, only two conclusions could be reached: Your Old Droog was Nas, or he was some kid from Coney Island who had purposefully erased his entire online backlog and hid from the rap media. The idea that Droog might be a young rapper who simply did not like Twitter or Instagram or YouTube or self-promotion was more or less impossible.
