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100 Best Albums
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- APR 19, 1994
- 10 Songs
- It Was Written · 1996
- Illmatic · 1994
- Illmatic · 1994
- It Was Written · 1996
- Illmatic · 1994
- God's Son · 2002
- NASIR · 2018
- I Am... · 1999
- Late Registration · 2005
- Illmatic · 1994
Essential Albums
- While Nas’ 1994 classic Illmatic is often hailed as the golden standard for hip-hop debuts, there’s a dedicated sect of his fanbase that prefers his chart-topping follow-up, It Was Written. Nas’ early work had established him as a prodigious street poet with uncanny observational gifts. But Nas was after more than critical acclaim; he wanted superstardom, plaques, and respect. And on It Was Written, released in 1996, he makes a good case for why he’s worthy of them all: “There’s one life, one love, so there can only be one king,” he raps on “The Message.” This is the album in which the rapper adopted the persona of “Nas Escobar”—a mafioso alter ego inspired by drug lords, as well as rap contemporaries like Notorious B.I.G. and the Wu-Tang Clan’s Raekwon. The imaginative approach took his career to new artistic and commercial heights. It Was Written is a gangsta flick over speakers, with Nas serving as both Coppola and Brando—he sets the scene as director, and takes on the star role. “The Message” has him scoping enemies and bedding baddies in a Mercedes-Benz wagon; “Watch Dem N****s” questions his crew with suspicions of betrayal; and “Shootouts” narrates a plot to take out a trigger-happy police officer. The storytelling on It Was Written is stark, cinematic, and full of details: No-name extras are rendered as vividly as the album’s main characters, down to their clothes, hair, and facial expressions. Musically, Nas’ flow becomes more spacious, eschewing his multi-syllabic delivery for one that’s light and effortless. And to soundtrack his new approach, he enlisted the Trackmasters, the production team that had already made crossover hits like Notorious B.I.G.’s “Juicy” and Mary J. Blige’s “Be Happy.” The duo supplied Nas with silky smooth beats that veered left of the boom-bap foundation he had laid on Illmatic, helping Nas find the largest audience he’d ever seen. But Nas’ street tales didn’t mean he abandoned substance. He imaginatively personifies himself as a gun on “I Gave You Power,” portraying resentment and helplessness toward the hordes who endlessly use him to destroy communities. “Black Girl Lost,” meanwhile, speaks of a young woman who struggles with self-love as a result of heartbreak and objectification. And “If I Ruled the World (Imagine That)” imagines a hood-utopia, one free of cops, poverty, and fear. Nas didn’t duplicate the vibes of his debut, but he had bigger dreams to pursue—and It Was Written was his first step toward reaching them.
- 100 Best Albums Nas lied to us. Four tracks into his debut album, he told listeners, “The world is yours,” but he was wrong. And if he didn’t know it going into the release of Illmatic, he knew almost immediately after. As the critical rap universe would assure him, the world belonged to Nas himself—a New York rap prodigy hailing from the talent-rich Queensbridge housing projects whose 10-track debut realized the promise he’d shown as a guest MC on Main Source’s “Live at the Barbeque.” And while the album was immediately recognized as a gem by those in the know, its impact on hip-hop at large would only fully be appreciated in the years following.<BR> Illmatic is only nine actual songs (not counting opener “The Genesis"), and while it was reportedly released in haste to combat the rampant bootlegging of an early version, it’s no less heavy a listen. Its first single, “Halftime,” appears on the soundtrack of the 1992 film Zebrahead and, coupled with his “Live at the Barbeque” verse, positioned Nas as hip-hop's next great MC, well before an album was ready. With Illmatic, Nas' poetic aptitude reveals itself, the MC introducing turns of phrase and perspective previously unheard within the art form. “My mic check is life or death, breathing a sniper's breath/I exhale the yellow smoke of buddha through righteous steps/Deep like The Shining, sparkle like a diamond/Sneak a Uzi on the island in my army jacket lining,” he spits on “It Ain’t Hard to Tell.”<BR> Illmatic’s sample-heavy sound comes courtesy of a veritable dream team of production talent (DJ Premier, Large Professor, Q-Tip, Pete Rock, and L.E.S.), a lineup that helped to break a long-standing tradition of single-producer hip-hop albums. Together they present a unified vision of the murky, guttural, jazz-heavy hip-hop that would come to define the '90s New York sound. Aside from L.E.S., the group were all established in their lanes, but they'd elevate their practices for Nas, an MC of his caliber making it that much easier for everyone to shine. Over menacing piano lines (“N.Y. State of Mind”) and horn stabs (“It Ain't Hard to Tell”), Nas is able to transition seamlessly and continuously between freewheeling non sequiturs and vivid storytelling (a verse from “One Love” would inspire a scene in video director Hype Williams' feature film Belly).<BR> The only person who gets a guest verse on the effort is AZ (“Life’s a Bitch”), and the Brooklyn MC makes the absolute most of the opportunity, effectively writing himself into history by “visualizin' the realism of life in actuality.” Did AZ know then what Illmatic would go on to mean for Nas and for hip-hop in general? Was he aware of the album’s potency and its likelihood to launch the man they called Nasty Nas toward superstardom while also setting a course for him to become an all-time great? Or was AZ simply chasing his own moment, another victim of Nas' unintentional goading, believing his friend when he told him, “The world is yours.”
- 2023
- 2023
- 2022
Artist Playlists
- Hear the story of the chosen one from Queensbridge.
- Hip-hop's revered narrative stylist influences the genre's best storytellers.
- Cutting rhymes and innovative experiments from the New York MC.
- Listen to the hits performed on their blockbuster tour.
- The rap gods and jazz cats behind his mic skills.
- The saga continues! Hear the songs these New York legends are playing on the road.
Compilations
- John Legend & Florian Picasso
- Mary J. Blige
More To Hear
- They called him the Second Coming for a reason.
- We connect the dots in Queens, from Nas to Nicki Minaj.
- Nas’ old music aged like fine wine, but his new music is just as fresh.
- The artists talk about 'Judas and the Black Messiah.'
- Plus, tracks by Popcaan, Drake, and more.
- On love, loss, and the Bad Boy Reunion.
About Nas
A genre’s quintessential recording is forged from the eternal quest for artistic perfection: Nas established hip-hop’s apogee with his first album, Illmatic. Born Nasir Jones in New York City in 1973, the son of jazz musician Olu Dara redefined hip-hop in 1994 with his debut, flipping tales of structural poverty into intricate hood scripture and fomenting the boom bap style. His follow-up, 1996’s baroque and brooding It Was Written, reinvigorated mafioso rap and built Nas’ standing as music’s foremost chronicler of crime, a distinction he vividly defended with Stillmatic in 2001. On that album, Nas realized new modes of narrative (in “Rewind”) and spectacle (with the eruptive “One Mic”), distilling his ability to document street life like few others in rap. Evolving from Queensbridge project laureate to sage social documentarian, Nas certified a parabolic legacy throughout the 2000s, charging his allegorical, compound rhymes with public commentary. Energized by his stirring blue-sky alliance with reggae scion Damien Marley, 2010’s Distant Relatives, Nas returned with the cultured Life Is Good in 2012, leading the golden age into the present with midlife verity, a winning composite he continued with the 2020 album King’s Disease. Reflecting on three decades of influence so far, Nas told Apple Music, “I’ve been blessed enough to see a gift in myself, polish it, present it to the world, and light comes to it.”
- FROM
- Brooklyn, NY, United States of America
- BORN
- September 14, 1973
- GENRE
- Hip-Hop/Rap