Nas

Nas

100 Best Albums

Essential Albums

  • The Lost Tapes
    The Lost Tapes
    The Lost Tapes

    The beginning of Nas’ career is straight out of a hip-hop fairy tale: He earned praise as a prodigy with an appearance on Main Source’s “Live at the Barbeque”, where he audaciously rhymed that he “went to hell for snuffing Jesus”; lived up to the hype with the all-time classic 1994 debut album Illmatic; and earned success on the charts a few years later with his hit single “If I Ruled the World (Imagine That)”, from his sophomore album It Was Written. But in the subsequent years, he weathered tumult. His ambitious plans for a double-disc called I Am… were thwarted by leaks, leading him to record a heft of new songs for its eventual 1999 release. He dropped his critically panned fourth album Nastradamus in the same year, convincing listeners that the insightful street poet had lost his way for a materialistic and impersonal version of himself. A triumphant battle with JAY-Z and the back-to-basics 2001 album Stillmatic conveyed a reinvigorated return to his roots. But 2002’s The Lost Tapes—a collection of unreleased songs that were bastardised by leaks and industry red tape—proved that Nas had never really lost his way in the first place. Most albums featuring unreleased material are perceived as vaults of throwaways with flashes of brilliance—stuff that wasn’t good enough to make the final cut of studio albums. But The Lost Tapes has some of the most focused and impressive songs of Nas’ career. Many of the collection’s 12 songs are overtly autobiographical and introspective, showing his original vision for I Am...: “Doo Rags” is an impressionistic recollection of his childhood in 1980s Queensbridge; “Drunk By Myself” finds Nas isolating himself into a depressive, self-destructive stupor; and the album closers “Poppa Was a Playa” and “Fetus” take a hyper-conceptual approach to observing his family’s actions and pondering their impact on his own behaviour. But The Lost Tapes doesn’t rely solely on diaristic memories: “Black Zombie” pleads for listeners to aspire beyond stereotypes and oppressive systems, while “No Idea’s Original” and “Purple” are sharp, stream-of-consciousness rhymes that spark like lightning in a bottle. These cuts could have completely changed the perception of Nas’ less lauded works, but as is, The Lost Tapes is proof that Nas has more heat on his cutting-room floor than most have ever touched.

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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 realised 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. Energised 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.”

HOMETOWN
Brooklyn, NY, United States of America
BORN
14 September 1973
GENRE
Hip-Hop/Rap

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