Nas

Nas

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Essential Albums

  • The Lost Tapes
    The Lost Tapes

    Compiling previously unreleased songs recorded between 1998 and 2001, The Lost Tapes is a straight-up collection that delves deep into Nas’ introspective side. Over the subdued jazzy piano of “Doo Rags,” the MC’s childhood memories blur into the present day as sociopolitical insights merge with first-person storytelling. Another standout is the soul-sampling, Temptations-channeling “Poppa Was a Playa”—one of Kanye West’s earliest productions—a vivid, bittersweet homage to Nas’ dad, flaws and all.

  • Stillmatic
    Stillmatic

    Nas' 1994 debut album, Illmatic, immediately cemented the Queens MC as one of rap music's most gifted and celebrated lyricists—a scene-painter almost without parallel, delivering an endlessly quotable stream of aphorisms steeped in the traditions of New York rap. During the seven years after Illmatic, however, Nas was known mainly for pop crossover records and club bangers. That all changed in 2001, when Nas and JAY-Z clashed in one of the most explosive dis wars in rap history; “Ether,” the name of Nas' savage song-length diatribe, promptly entered the slang lexicon as a word for completely decimating your opponent. "Ether" is the second track of Stillmatic, Nas' fifth album and full-length return to hungry, introspective, non-commercial rhyming. Here, Nas is back to what made him adored in the '90s: snapshots of his youth, vivid visions of crime, boasts that paint him as no less than one of the all-time greats—and the lyrics to back it up. The powerful "One Mic"—based on the quiet-loud dynamics of Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight"—is a tongue-twisting ode to his own art in the shadows of hood life and beef. "Rewind" tells a story in reverse, while "Destroy and Rebuild" is built with some Slick Rick-styled flows. Like Illmatic's grab bag of collaborators, the beats come courtesy of friends old and new. On single "Got Ur Self A…," producer Megahertz flips the Sopranos theme into an icy track; on "You're da Man," Large Professor utilizes the voice of Rodriguez years before Searching for Sugar Man; and DJ Premier uses Peabo Bryson and Roberta Flack for the partially nostalgic "2nd Childhood." All in all, a triumphant return to form from a rap great.

  • It Was Written
    It Was Written

    It Was Written is loaded with lyrics so intricate, you can envision them scribbled in shabby composition books. The result is an album that plays out like a panoramic shot of both the circa-’90s projects and the mind of a brilliant storyteller. Tales like “The Message” and “Street Dreams” are as rough as they are reflective, but Nas still has a way of casually breezing over beats—whether he’s observing the war zone from inside or, on “If I Ruled the World,” dreaming of a way out.

  • Illmatic
    Illmatic

    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. 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.” 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). 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.”

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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 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.”

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