Rapper Nas refused to heed warning signs that his marriage to Kelis was doomed because he thought the couple could be an inspiration to the hip-hop generation.

The couple's four-year union ended with a very messy divorce and custody battle shortly before their son Knight was born in 2009, and now the I Can hitmaker admits he should have known the marriage wouldn't work.

He tells Complex magazine, "It (relationship) was a problem I was attracted to. It was rock and roll. I saw Kelis as Courtney Love - but I also saw her as a mahogany queen. I saw us as a beautiful thing. I saw us as inspiration. People weren't seeing hip-hop artists get married."

"A lot of people came at me crazy, but I think overall, we were inspiring people to love... In the beginning, I said, 'There's parts of this that might not work,' but there was a beautiful part of it too."

He also claims his marriage to Kelis started faltering when she turned out not to be the woman he thought she was: "There was a lot of things thrown at her that she couldn't handle... Every night she was in bed with Harvard... She had all the answers, but I needed something more from her that she either wasn't ready or didn't know how to provide."

"Plus, she is younger than me and she hadn't seen all the things I had seen. She was on her journey, I was on mine."