B.F.F.

Post-game reaction from MTV's All Eyes on Nas and Jay-Z, Feb 16. (other airdates):

• This is the first time I get to use the bulleted list option.

• Let me just get the Project Runway people satisfied. It's good to see Jay setting aside Senior PGA Tour attire for a minute. Hip-Hop needs more hoodies. And Nas' Nike flight jacket should be no fashion surprise to anyone ("in my flight jacket, adrenaline heightened"), but its color scheme might remind some of another infamous wardrobe choice. And did you check the throwback part in the hair? Just as Samson went, maybe so too does Nas.

• It's a shame I have to make this kind of notice in 2006, but as a preliminary caution, if you're going to resort to breaking down music and personal lives like some kind of sports record ("___ won" / "____ loss" ), step your vocabulary up, e.g. "Jay was vanquished quite stupendously, ergo Nas is evermore triumphant." Help make childishness more intellectually stimulating.

• All you Nixon-Kennedy speculators that want to read into body language, though I think Jay's seat was positioned differently than Nas' to begin with, throughout the interview, Jay's back was turned at an angle away from Nas. I wonder what the kinesics crowd would say about that.

• Sway gets minor props for not skating by the "tough subjects", condoms on the seat and all that, but after the first question, damn, man, you don't need to keep dwelling on 2001. He sounded less like a semi-credible interviewer there and more like someone you'd find with a username and a post count.

• Nothing too suprising in the televised portion. Full-length text goes into what was edited out. But now that the two of them have talked, it's up to the music to do the rest.

Quotables:

• Jay: "I didn't sign Nas, I partnered with Nas. You can't sign an artist of Nas' stature, you can only partner with him."

• Jay: "This isn't like high school. You don't sit down with people and be like 'so, we friends now.'"

• Nas: "It wasn't that he wanted to gun me down or I wanted to gun him down. It was never that. That's not how real bosses move or real men move."

• Jay on Takeover: "That was like a figure-four leg-lock."

• Nas on Ether: "Then I just lit a bomb!"

• Nas: "I look at the state of the game. I'll always love rap, no matter what's going on. You look at it, and you say all of us are not putting our best foot forward. Not just the rappers, you look at the DJs and the stuff they playing — it's not necessarily that stuff that made you want to rap. It's a system now. Back in the day, Rap Attack, Mr. Magic, Marley Marl, Red Alert, Chuck Chillout — what Biggie was talking about in 'Juicy' — that's missing. When DJs were playing something like when I first heard UTFO — it wasn't because it was a hit. Those were joints; DJs was letting us hear the jams on the radio. It was like, 'Damn, I want to write today!' So it ain't just the rappers when I say I ain't feeling the game. I'm talking about all of us. Let's make it pop again."

• "It's bigger than both of us."

LINKS: MTV Transcript (with unaired interview) / Youtube streaming