Nav, a Toronto-born rapper, is backing away from the use of the N-Word in his music. Nav decided to drop use of the racial slur following heated backlash in March.
Nav spoke with Complex regarding use of the n-word, and his decision to drop it from his vocabulary:
“Well, it’s like, the neighborhood I grew up in is very multicultural. It goes from Chinese to white to black to Jamaican, everything, right? Everybody uses that word freely. A Chinese guy is saying it to me, I’m saying it to a black guy, a black guy’s saying it to me. It’s all like that. I was making music for me and my friends in the beginning. So I didn’t really think anything of it. But then once I got to the global level and I started seeing a little bit of backlash, I totally cut it out. I respect it. In my neighborhood it’s cool, but out here it’s not cool. So I just play by the rules. [On this album], you won’t hear me say it once.”
Nav omitted use of the word in his collaborative project “Perfect Timing” with Metro Boomin.
Many people of African descent previously took to social media to check the Nav for dropping the n-bomb:
