Some collaborations are business arrangements. Others feel like a reunion. When Nas and Damian “Jr. Gong” Marley released Distant Relatives on May 18, 2010, it sounded like two branches of the same family tree finding each other again.
Queensbridge poetry met Kingston fire, and both looked back toward Africa.
Distant Relatives, the Nas album made in full partnership with Damian Marley, was released through Universal Republic and Def Jam.
It was recorded between 2008 and 2010 in Los Angeles and Miami, and it was the first time Nas had shared an entire album with another artist.
The title says it plainly: the bond between the two men, their shared African ancestry, and the common ancestry of the whole human race.
Sixteen years on, the album still stands as one of the boldest bridges ever built between hip-hop and reggae.
From “Road to Zion” to a Full Album
The seed was planted on “Road to Zion,” the brooding standout from Damian’s 2005 landmark Welcome to Jamrock.
Nas’s verse over that minor-key riddim showed how naturally the two voices locked together. The chemistry was too strong to leave as a one-off.
Damian’s manager, Dan Dalton, says the concept came from him. He pitched an Africa-centred collaboration: a short EP, then a tour.
Leftover songs from both artists’ earlier albums were meant to form that EP. The sessions went so well that the plan grew into a full-length record.
Nas broke the news in comments to MTV at the 2009 Grammys. Even then he framed it as more than music, saying the project would help raise money to build schools in Africa. “Africa has been heavy on my mind for years,” he said at the time.
Building the Sound
Damian and his brother Stephen Marley handled most of the production. Damian produced the bulk of the record, while Stephen took the controls on “Leaders” and “Patience.”
Damian and Nasir Jones served as executive producers. James “Bonzai” Caruso mixed the album and Chris Athens mastered it.
What sets the album apart is its texture. Stephen leaned mostly on live instrumentation, with some sampling, folding reggae and dancehall into hip-hop structures alongside classical and modern African styles. Damian was clear that this was not meant to be another quick crossover.
“A lot of the (past) collaborations were more in the nature of a remix,” he said. In Mix he described the process this way: “We tried to approach things track by track in a really organic way.”
Nas put it more bluntly to Reggae Report: “It’s not Reggae… it’s not Rap… it’s some different shit… it’s epic.”
The sample choices show where their heads were. “As We Enter” is built on Mulatu Astatke’s “Yegelle Tezeta,” pulling Ethiopian jazz into a rapid-fire back-and-forth between the two MCs.
“Patience” draws on “Sabali” by the Malian duo Amadou & Mariam, turning their gentle electronic hymn into a meditation on the mysteries of existence.
“Tribes at War” interpolates Little Roy’s roots classic “Tribal War,” a nod to reggae’s tradition of reworking and reversioning songs and riddims across generations.
Nah Mean” samples “Kurikute,” and “My Generation” carries elements of Ziggy Marley’s “Generation,” keeping things in the Marley family.
The Songs and the Company They Keep
The standard edition runs 13 tracks, about an hour long: “As We Enter,” “Tribes at War,” “Strong Will Continue,” “Leaders,” “Friends,” “Count Your Blessings,” “Dispear,” “Land of Promise,” “In His Own Words,” “Nah Mean,” “Patience,” “My Generation” and “Africa Must Wake Up.” An iTunes bonus edition adds a fourteenth track featuring Junior Reid.
The guest list feels carefully chosen. Somali-Canadian artist K’naan is credited as a writer on “Tribes at War” and the closing “Africa Must Wake Up,” which gives both songs a voice from the continent itself.
Stephen Marley appears on “Leaders” and “In His Own Words,” and the late soul great Betty Wright adds backing vocals to the latter.
“Land of Promise” carries a writing and vocal credit for Dennis Brown, the Crown Prince of Reggae, linking the record directly to Jamaica’s golden era.
My Generation” brings in Lil Wayne, with Joss Stone singing uncredited on the hook. It is the album’s biggest swing at radio, an anthem about youth inheriting a broken world.
Africa at the Centre
The album was never meant to make money for its makers alone. At release, proceeds were earmarked for African development projects, including a school in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Damian knew how such projects could land.
“A lot of charity albums come off corny,” he said. The answer was to make the music strong enough to carry the message, not the other way round.
That is why the record holds up. Songs like “Africa Must Wake Up” and “Leaders” read as calls to self-determination, not pity.
In a later Billboard interview, Damian looked back on the record as “ahead of its time” for putting African culture in the spotlight years before Afrobeats went global. In the same conversation he said he would love to perform the album in Africa one day.
Release, Charts and the Road
Three singles led the way: “As We Enter” in February 2010, “Strong Will Continue” in April, and “My Generation” in the UK that August.
“As We Enter” reached No. 39 on the UK Singles chart, No. 16 on Billboard’s Bubbling Under Hot 100 and No. 18 on Hot Digital R&B/Hip-Hop Songs.
The album debuted at No. 5 on the Billboard 200, selling about 57,000 copies in its first week. That made it Nas’s tenth top-ten album and Damian’s second. It also landed on the Rap, R&B/Hip-Hop, Digital Album and Reggae charts.
The tour began in California during release week, then moved to Bonnaroo in Tennessee before crossing to Europe for dates in Paris, Cologne, Rotterdam, Manchester and Dublin.
Nas trading bars while Gong tossed his locks onstage became one of the defining live pairings of that summer.
Why It Still Matters
Critics received Distant Relatives warmly, and time has been kinder still. Albumism called it a turning point for Nas after an uneven 2000s, and the album is widely seen as the record that reignited his creative fire ahead of Life Is Good. Okayplayer has framed it as a bridge between two diaspora traditions. Both readings are right.
The album keeps resurfacing. Damian and Nas were announced to perform it on the Welcome to Jamrock Reggae Cruise.
This month, when the University of the West Indies at Mona awarded Damian an honorary doctorate on November 7, Distant Relatives stood among the projects that defined his career.
Long before streaming made Lagos, Kingston and New York feel like one neighbourhood, Nas and Jr. Gong made an album that treated them as family. It still sounds like a homecoming.
