Rapper Nas, left, and his wife and fellow musician, Kelis, arrive at the 50th annual Grammy awards on Feb. 10, 2008 in Los Angeles. (Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)

Be advised, this article contains offensive language. It’s not about expletives like George Carlin’s Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television; those are mere curses, more crude than malignant. Instead the topic is hate speech, with one epithet in particular: “nigger.” It is a bruise to speak: an n that solicits a snarl; two hard g’s thrown from the mouth like a punch. The word is unwelcome in the public square, although that doesn’t prevent it from being said — often to devastating effect — in all kinds of ways.

On last Friday's episode of The View, co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck broke into tears during a charged conversation about the N word with moderator Whoopi Goldberg. But the slur has preoccupied the music press since last autumn, leading up to the July 16 release of Untitled by the rapper Nas — an album that he originally tried to name Nigger.

Ever since his 1994 debut, the mighty Illmatic, Queensbridge, N.Y.’s Nasir Jones has been hip hop’s Hemingway, a gruff, macho storyteller who communicates in declarative sentences. Here’s what he told MTV News last October:

“I wanna make [the N word] easy on mothaf---as’ ears. You see how white boys ain’t mad at [the word] ‘cracker’ cause it don’t have the same [sting] as ‘nigger?’ I want ‘nigger’ to have less meaning [than] ‘cracker'.”

Nas stuck to that position for months, fully intending to put his intended title into wide release. Universal Music Group, his distributor, forced the change this spring, surely dreading the refusal of major retailers like Wal-Mart to stock it. No matter what Nas’s disc is called, it’s hip hop’s most cogent deliberation on the N word in decades.

The word’s roots go centuries deep, dating to the Latin word niger (meaning black) to describe dark skin pigment. From the Old World to the Americas, niger begat negar, neger, nègre, negro, neggar and ultimately nigger. For many — if not all — people, the word is inextricably connected to slavery, lynching and the U.S. civil rights movement.

Nas's new album, Untitled. (Universal Music Group)

It’s become a staple of hip-hop lyrics, although the vast majority of emcees prefer to pronounce it with an “a” at the end. Searches of The Original Hip-Hop Lyrics Archive turn up 18,900 results for “nigga” and 214 for “nigger.” For the past quarter century, rappers have repeated the modified N word like a machine gun’s spray. In the 1980s, emcees like the Furious Five, Kool Moe Dee and Slick Rick all committed “nigga” to wax; in the ’90s, the Wu-Tang Clan, Snoop (Doggy) Dogg and the Notorious B.I.G. treated it like punctuation — there were almost as many “niggas” in their rhymes as commas. 2Pac re-conceived it as an acronym: “Never Ignorant Getting Goals Accomplished.” In this decade, stars like Kanye West, Lil Wayne and Jay-Z routinely spit the word without inflection.

There are notable exceptions. Chuck D, arguably hip hop’s premier social commentator, was careful to pronounce the “-er” on Public Enemy records like Anti-Nigger Machine (1990); mostly, however, he prefers to address black people as his “brothers and sisters.” Oakland emcee Del Tha Funkee Homosapien rapped the “-er” on Del’s Nightmare (1996), a song that compared the music industry to the slave trade. And now there’s Nas.

The way Chuck D and Nas treat the N word are “attempts to get black people to think critically about how things have not changed from the time when it was used to insult, to threaten, to put down, to degradate, to dehumanize,” says Rinaldo Walcott, an associate professor of sociology and equity studies at the University of Toronto and the author of Black Like Who? (1997), a collection of essays about black culture in Canada. “They’re trying to articulate a certain kind of political position, which is, ‘Ay people, look what’s still happening.’”

Nas’s naming plan sparked instant controversy in the U.S. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Rev. Jesse Jackson, Rev. Al Sharpton and Fox News all objected to Nas’s proposed album title as a matter of principle. (Or ratings: Nas was already on Fox personality Bill O’Reilly’s radar, but has since become a go-to target for the host’s ire.)

The rapper answered his critics by telling them to shut up. "If [scholar] Cornel West was making an album called Nigger, they would know he’s got something intellectual to say. To think I’m gonna say something that’s not intellectual is calling me a nigger, and to be called a nigger by Jesse Jackson and the NAACP is counterproductive, counter-revolutionary,” Nas said at the time. (As it turns out, Jackson may have some explaining to do himself. He recently used the N word while expressing a desire to castrate Barack Obama.)

“This attempt to banish the N word is a fantasy. It’s a fantasy that things in the U.S. have changed so radically for all black people. Yes, they have in terms of middle-class and upper-middle-class black people, but we’ve also seen larger numbers of African-Americans recede into very, very serious poverty,” Walcott says. “There are those contradictions. In some ways the debate and the fight around the use of the word ‘nigger’ clouds larger questions. That’s where Nas wanted to go, to speak to those larger concerns.”

Canadian author Lawrence Hill's award-winning novel, The Book of Negroes, left, was retitled for publication in the U.S. (Harper Collins Canada)

Language evolves, says Canadian author Lawrence Hill. Last year, his Commonwealth Writers’ Prize-winning novel The Book of Negroes — named for an actual document used in the American slave trade — was retitled, at his U.S. publisher’s insistence, prior to its debut south of the border. Hill chose the replacement title Someone Knows My Name (a reference to Nobody Knows My Name, James Baldwin’s famous essay collection on the black experience in the U.S.). Urban blacks in America, Hill notes, now interpret “negro” to mean inauthentic or spineless — an Uncle Tom, even.

“I like to joke that if you use the word negro in Canada, you indicate that you’re archaic and completely out of touch with modern terminology. If you use it in the States, you’re asking to get your nose broken,” Hill says on the phone from his Burlington, Ont., home. “There are all sorts of middle-aged or older blacks in Canada and the United States who are mortified by the use of the word [‘nigger’]. I don’t use it, and it would really tick me off if my kids were using it on the street,” Hill adds.

“But many people who are in their teens and 20s use the word as glibly as I might use ‘pancake,’ and they flip it just as fast as I might flip a pancake. So I think it’s fascinating to watch the parallel between the ascent of the word ‘nigger’ and the descent of the word ‘negro.’ There’s a huge generational divide.”

“I joke that if you use the word negro in Canada, you indicate that you’re archaic and completely out of touch with modern terminology. If you use it in the States, you’re asking to get your nose broken.” — Lawrence Hill

Jemini, a Toronto hip-hop poet, has personal experience with that separation. “I’ve been encouraged by certain people that it’s OK for me to use [‘nigger’] against them because I’m a friend, but not every word has to be for me. I don’t have a burning urge to call someone a word that is insulting to them because I’m ‘down.’ I can live my life without using it,” she says. “There are some people who think black people shouldn’t be using it at all — that’s the Oprah argument.”

Nas, though, claims to speak for hip hop’s fabled street, a dangerous territory trafficked by gangstas, thugs, pimps and pretenders. To his mind, these are the very people — black, white and otherwise — who embody the stereotypes that are painted by the N word’s most loathsome connotations. A cynical observer might say Nas should have known a CD called Nigger would never reach store shelves — particularly from a rapper whose shine has faded since the long-ago Illmatic. From that perspective, Nas has perhaps accomplished music’s guerrilla marketing campaign of the year; without the title controversy, Untitled was unlikely to generate a ripple of attention in the mainstream.

It’s true that Nas’s planned title likely offended everyone who cringes at any mention of the N word — but it’s also true that the album was condemned months before anyone listened to its contents. And now that its lyrics can be heard at last, what does Nasty Nas actually have to say for himself? “I love America, I love my people / I love all mankind, all nationalities... / End all racism, all injustice, all oppression / To poor people, any people, anywhere on this planet / Let’s come together, a new day is rising,” he raps on We’re Not Alone.

Not all 15 of Untitled’s songs are so optimistic, but each of them (Y’all My Niggas, Black President, You Can’t Stop Us Now, etc.) confront issues of race — and what it means to be considered a “nigger” in the 21st century — without flinching. “If [a controversial title] is what it takes to bring some attention to the real lyrics that he has to say, then that’s the good that can come from this,” Jemini says.

To borrow hip-hop lingo’s preferred affirmation: Word.

Matthew McKinnon is a writer based in Toronto.