A living legend that plenty of people seem to sleep on. Nas is a Queens native that has remained loyal to his home town through out his whole career. Nas had an innovative voice that gave you an image of what his life was like growing up in New York, showing both dark and inspiring sides to the city. He is a lyrical genius that set a new standard of sound and rhymes in the early 90’s.

Nas was super poppin’ in the 90’s and his album ‘Illmatic’ was probably his peaking point in his career. The thing that keeps Nas relevant is that album. He had some singles released in the early 2000’s but the projects didn’t nearly impact the industry as much as Illmatic did. Every single song that he put on Illmatic had a grungy-quality but sharing a smooth jazz feeling, it has a great balance making it pleasing to your ears. Later on in his career (late 90’s) he released some more albums, which one can argue that it kept up with his freshman album mentioned above.

Fast-forwarding to 2006- That Hip-hop is Dead album sucked ass and it kind of helped kill hip-hop (joking). But god damn, Nas fucked up with the project cause he strayed away from his usual structure. The numbers and the quality of this album was fucking bunk. At this point hip-hop was kinda dead, we had T-Pain’s bitch ass singing in auto-tune and Akon singing “smack that”. Early 2000’s hip-hop was wHack as fuck (big H for emphasis). Those were our most played songs in the hip-hop/rap genre, which is appalling.

It’s important to talk about Nas because when we talk about the greats we forget to mention him as well as others, but this dude changed the way hip-hop was produced and manufactured for about a decade.

The bottom line is that Nas had a story to tell and he told it well, using descriptive language and assigning moods and emotions to the streets. Dont let the 2000 Nas discredit Nas as a legend...

Listen to Illmatic:

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