Nas - "Y'All My Ni**as" (mp3)

At the height of the Nas/Jay-Z beef, I was a total Jay partisan, always have preferred him, although a lot of that was partly because of the era I started paying attention to rap; It Was Written and its ridiculous videos were the first I ever heard of Nas and by comparison Jay just seemed way cooler, I didn't get into Illmatic until much later. But I will say this: Blueprint may have crushed Stillmatic, but I'll take all 4 of Nas's albums since then over Jay's last 4. In retrospect, I overrated Hip Hop Is Dead and think it's the weakest of that batch, but even that was pretty decent. And his untitled album formerly known as Ni**er takes a similar approach, but one-ups it by actually sticking to its controversy-baiting title for large stretches, and keeping Nas more focused, energized and on-topic than he's been in a long time. I'll never play the "best since Illmatic" game, but best since God's Son ain't bad.

I liveblogged Nas's Untitled the first time I listened to an early leak of it, and was pretty into it at the moment, and then proceeded to barely touch it for a few weeks. Revisiting it again lately, though, it's not as good but still pretty enjoyable. There's the usual goofy, contradictory Nas stuff and completely unresearched "knowledge"; who else but Nas would write a whole song about roaches without bothering to learn that they don't have 8 legs? All the "No matter what the CD called, I'm unbeatable y'all" stuff on "Hero" sounds like disingenuous rhetoric to me, but the song is still so powerful that I kind of buy it when he says it. Only real problem is that he shouldn't have let all the people sleeping on Salaam Remi's great work on his last few albums keep him from getting more of his beats on the Def Jam albums. And really Green Lantern should have more tracks on here, he's probably the one guy who's a potentially great producer who'd get more album placements if he wasn't so associated with mixtapes. And after Ni**er and The Ni**er Tape, I'm looking forward to Nas's next release, which I can only assume will be called Dump Truck.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 28, 2008 at 10:03 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.