Exodus
If I Ruled The World
It Was Written is an album in motion, fighting itself — fighting to give everyone what they want, what Nas thought they wanted. It’s Nas both fleeing the expectations Illmatic brought him, and hotfooting towards radio play, stardom, the elusive throne: the King of New York, the Crown Prince of Rap.
As hip hop developed in the ’80s, it also began to unite — like any emergent nation, it coalesced behind standard bearers, rulers, kings. The first was Kurtis Blow; it’s no coincidence Nas interpolates “If I Ruled The World.” In the movie Krush Groove, whenever Kurtis appears there’s a golden light around him; everyone practically genuflects before him. He’s not part of the plot at all, the loves and schemes: he wafts in and out, floats above all that by divine right. But Krush Groove is also the story of his unseating, it’s the coup and coronation of Run-DMC. Again, no coincidence the record of their ascendency is called King of Rock. No coincidence: Kings from Queens, from Queens come kings. A black hat is my crown, symbolizing the sound.
And lo, Run-DMC begat LL Cool J, who extended the kingdom to the mid-album crossover mushy love ballad. (Rakim immediately ascended to the godhead. He is more than a king.) And from the West emerged challengers: Snoop Dogg, and his cunning vizier Dr. Dre. From the South, rumblings of secession. And so is begat Tupac, Biggie: reigns tragically cut short before they could begin. As rap begins to conquer the world, the crown is pure platinum — not just supremacy on the mic, on the streets anymore.
The Emperor is Key IV in the Tarot’s Major Arcana: uniting the four elements, the four winds, the four corners of the compass, the four seasons, the four letters in the name of God. There’s one life, one love, so there can only be one king.
LL was the last One True King: everything after is wars of supremacy, divided loyalties, a return to factionalism and regionalism. So it’s at this key moment that the Young Prince Nas must try to pull five mics from the stone.
Act II, Scene i: The ’95 Source Awards. Night.
On the eve of his coronation, the empire is consumed by civil war. The crown is snatch’d away. Shakespeare couldn’t have written it better, if you also throw in the opening of The Warriors.
In the proscenium, the House of Puffy fills the right; in the middle, the upstarts of the Dirty South, and the House of Death Row.
Ed Lover: Two households, both alike in dignity. From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
Enter, stage left: Nas, wearing an enormous oversized Tommy Hilfiger shirt he had to borrow money to buy. He joins the left side, where the House of Real is sitting: Wu-Tang, Mobb Deep, and the rest. As the awards are granted, he loses to Biggie. Twice. He’s totally ignored in the drama that transpires, he’s not even a minor character. As Questlove tells it:
The more he got ignored for Illmatic, I literally saw his body melt in his seat. Almost like he was ashamed. He just looked so defeated. I was like, “Yo, he’s not gonna be the same after this shit.” None of us were the same after that day.
To this day, I wish I would have gone up to him and said, “Do not let this moment determine your future.” Because by the end of the night, I instantly knew that he was going to throw away everything, this whole night, and now do it: compete with Biggie.
Puffy: I live in the East, and I’m gonna die in the East!
Snoop: The East Coast ain’t got no love for Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg and Death Row? Y’all don’t love us? Y’all don’t love us? Well, let it be known then!
Andre 3000: The South got something to say!
They actually said these things, in front of a rowdy crowd, in front of TV cameras. A theatrical show for a theatrical genre where the line between performance and reality are blurry as hell.
Busta Rhymes (doesn’t actually say this): Do you bite your thumb at me, sir?
The aftermath of that night had tragic and historic repercussions that still resonate: it crowned Biggie and Pac on warring thrones, and two years later they were both dead.
Kurtis Blow (at home with his feet up watching it on TV): See what a scourge is laid upon your hate! All are punishéd!
Enter, stage right: the G-Funk era, the East/West War, the shiny suit era.
Exeunt: In the wings, the underground puts on its backpack, goes out the fire door, into the alley, and starts a cipher.*
Enter, from the peanut gallery: three decades of bitching and moaning about “whatever happened to real hip hop?”
Exeunt: the Golden Age, boom bap, Nasty Nas, the promise of Illmatic.
Enter, stage left: Nas Escobar.
*Static on the Wool Fabric of History
“It Was Written marks the beginning of the commercial hip hop era, and Illmatic is the end of ‘real hip hop’”: This widely accepted narrative ignores the underground scenes that were already burgeoning. It’s just a more convenient story to tell about Nas.
By the time IWW comes out, DJ Krush and DJ Spooky already have albums out—Krush is on his fifth: illbient instrumental hip hop is in full effect. This reading of history erases the entire underground scene that evolves in parallel in the late ’90s— Lyricist Lounge, Rawkus, Anticon, Def Jux, etc. But that’s as it should be: the underground is underground, it’s unseen and unnoticed.
Company Flow vs. everything else is crazy: “Juvenile Hell” vs. “Juvenile Technique” (1993); Illmatic vs. Funcrusher EP (one year apart); IWW vs. Funcrusher Plus (one year apart). You can’t say one is a reaction to another: Puffy’s No Way Out and Funcrusher Plus came out on the same day. This is so logically apropos, it’s like it was planned. Time is indeed illmatic.
Take It In Blood
After The Emperor in the Tarot comes V: The Hierophant — tradition, orthodoxy, the superficial dressage of religion, of flag waving and hollow trappings of conformity.
Also in Nas’ reading is XV: The Devil. The card is not about Satan, it’s about bondage: to the material, to pride, to false powers, to sensation without understanding. Caught by the devil’s lasso, shit is a hassle.
Nas said of Steve Stoute, his new manager: “He was Cus D’Amato, I was Mike Tyson.” More like Don King and Mike Tyson. Stoute had ideas like:
I took NYC parking tickets and I copied them and printed them out. On one side was a parking ticket and on the other side was the release date. Everyone thought they got a parking ticket and then it was just promotion for a Nas album.
Yeah, you know what’s popping in the streets? Parking tickets, that’s the bomb. He knew exactly what he was doing:
Q-Tip said to me, “You’re killing his career.” Nas is an artist’s artist. My whole thing was I didn’t want him to end up being like Kool G Rap.
Russell Simmons said similar in passing on signing him to Def Jam: “He sounds like G Rap, and G Rap don’t sell no records, I’m not interested.” Everyone wanted Nas to escape the Curse of G Rap, this dire prophecy from three witches tying fates up in a Brooklyn basement. And true that, G Rap never quite found his lane for the career he should’ve had. Nas let himself be led by those around him— you could stretch to say “I Gave You Power” is about himself: a deadly weapon, but helpless in where it’s pointed.
Everyone goes on and on about how many units It Was Written moved in its first week, that it went triple platinum vs. Illmatic barely going gold. No doubt, we can’t ignore the importance of making money when odds are against you, of a Black man’s material success in Amerikkka. But we’re supposed to celebrate ruthless capitalism when it works for those it’s most stacked against? Why do we see sales as a meaningful benchmark? If you don’t own stock in UMG or whatever, who gives a shit? Are three platinum plaques worth more or less than people writing essays about your album encapsulating utopian time, whatever that even means? I’m not asking rhetorically. Who am I to disagree. Everybody’s looking for something.
Compared to the oceans of ink spilled on Illmatic, It Was Written isn’t much written about: mixed contemporaneous reviews, and since, a handful of track-by-track apologia and “in retrospect, it has some heat on it.” That’s true, but that doesn’t make it a classic; that makes it an excellent album. A classic is an album that pushes the form forwards, that leapfrogs over everything that came before, that has a unique and critical place in the formation and evolution of the sound. Illmatic, inarguably, does this. IWW does not do this.
(The close-follow-on sidequel, The Firm album, deserves a reappraisal. Narratively, it’s coherent and does a pretty good job of ‘album-as-story;’ sonically it’s pretty tight. As a sort-of film, it’s better than Belly.)
Outside of the embarrassing intro and “Black Girl Lost,” there aren’t any bad songs, but only a few truly great songs. It has more of Nas’ dazzling ability to weave intricate wordplay, his eye for detail and tiny moments; his unparalleled change ups of flow, speed and rhythm like the gearshift of a Lamborghini. But, like Foxy Brown’s math on “Affirmative Action,” it doesn’t add up properly. It’s a set of convoluted calculations that doesn’t solve for the variable of (N).
Straight Out The Gatsbys of Rap
The weight of expectations couldn’t have been greater. There is no way he could’ve lived up to that. He’s also in the classic dilemma of the followup: you put everything you had in the first one, everything you’d lived so far — what’s left to work with is whatever’s happened in the small slice of life since. You can’t go back to the well for more quarter waters of your youth; you already drained it.
IWW is a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man like Illmatic is to Dubliners: it’s about Nas trying to decide his identity, his canvas, his artistic subject. It’s about him being torn between success, real MCing, and using rap for Black uplift — between the sublime, traditions, and the flesh, and beating his own path.
Except, its endpoints are totally different: the end of Portrait is Stephen Dedalus rejecting the church, Ireland, and home to forge his own path, stay true to his art. IWW is like the Harlem Red chapters of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, without the looming omen of consequences and that it’s a step on a long journey towards greatness, another formative chapter. It’s an Act II without hints of III: climbing to the top, escaping the prison of QB, but unable to see the pinnacle or realize there isn’t one.
It’s restless and all over the place — he wants Farrakhan’s atonement, to free Mumia and all the prisoners in Attica, but he also wants the Movado and the Hennessey, the 300E and the Q4 Infinit and…an entire Long Island luxury car dealership. He’ll flip it in just one breath: Armani Exchange, the Range, cash, Lost Tribe of Shabbaz, free at last, brand new whips to crash, then we laugh in the iller path…
I want it all, ArmorAll Benz and endless papes. The whole album is about wanting, but he doesn’t really know what he wants. It’s that unfulfilled, grasping desire that drives the album. It’s The Great Gatsby, with Scarface sandwiched in between.
Everyone thinks Gatsby is about the Roaring ’20s, flappers and wild parties, tuxedos and the lush life. But the ENTIRE FUCKING POINT is that the whole milieu is spiritually and morally hollow, it’s empty, the eyes are always watching, it’s a tragedy. Gatsby is a mask, a charade, he’s pretending, everyone’s pretending. Champagne can’t fill you. Everybody’s looking for something.
“If I Ruled The World” carries a lot of weight here. It’s Nas’ first big radio hit. Lauryn Hill brings the most dulcet chorus of any crossover rap single. And she’s on the album because Stoute wanted someone with commercial clout. Like Daisy in Gatsby, “her voice is full of money.”
It’s no coincidence Nas often wears a white suit, like Tony Montana, like Gatsby. It’s all about striving, that hunger, for power and money and women, moving in the circles of the rich and wanting to be accepted by them—wanting respect above all. How many times has the “say good night to the bad guy” line been sampled? But everybody forgets what the scene in the restaurant is actually about: it’s Scarface’s realization that he’s got all he wanted, but it doesn’t fill the hole inside you, the rise wasn’t worth the cost, he’ll never be one of the rich, really.
Is this it? That’s what it’s all about, Manny? Eating, drinking, fucking, sucking? Snorting? Then what? Tell me. Then what? You’re fifty. You got a bag for a belly. You got tits, you need a bra. They got hair on them. You got a liver, it’s got spots on it, and you’re eating this fuckin’ shit, looking like these rich fucking mummies in here…is this what it’s all about? Is this what I work for? Coño.
Jay Gatsby is a cat from humble beginnings trying to claw his way up, only to fall all the way down. It Was Written stands on the dock, staring at the green light, but doesn’t even know what the light is. Scarface ends up full of bullets in the bloody pool in front of his The World Is Yours statue. In the end, does Nas walk right up to the sun or get burnt by it, Icarus style? Better find out before your time’s out, what the fuck.
Street Dreams
That 24-Carat Black sample on “Nas Is Coming” — the rising and falling of it, the sonorous and shamanic voice intoning the title — I love that. Yes, OK, the joint flips “Poverty’s Paradise” into “Paradise’s (Spiritual) Poverty,” but whatever, that’s sampling. (It’s great because 24-Carat Black is great: Dre’s genius was picking amazing familiar samples and looping the shit out of them.)
I used to listen to it on repeat on my Walkman constantly in Vietnam, zipping around Hanoi on the back of my man Phúc’s motorbike. (No, it rhymes with ‘duke.’) He’d weave in and out of traffic, dart around clanking cyclos, old ladies with yokes of vegetables. He had the Statue of Liberty tattooed on his chest. He called himself a con do, a gangsta. He had that Belmondo swagger and a cat’s grace. We drank a lot of beer and smoked cigarettes and ate dried cuttlefish together.
Around the time It Was Written dropped, I escaped from New York like Snake Plissken. I had to. I finished the Tarot cards. I didn’t really have anyone to show them to. I was throwing up on the F train platform most mornings on my way to work: a heroin hangover is worse than an alcohol one — it just keeps going until you do some more dope. Like every idiot ever, I thought I had it under control. I wasn’t stupid enough not to see where things were heading: you chase the dragon until it starts chasing you.
Back in the day, when you wanted to go off and be a novelist or whatever, like Joyce and Fitzgerald and them, you moved to Italy or Paris. By the ’90s that was out of the price range. I stashed my shit in my sister’s basement, agonized more over which two dozen tapes to bring than anything else, and headed east.
I liked Hanoi. I liked Vietnamese people, they were like New Yorkers: they took absolutely zero shit, but once you knew them, they held you down. I liked the mist in the mornings and the golden light in the afternoons. I liked the gelato at Hoan Kiem Lake and the 50¢ bowls of steaming pho. I liked the Temple of Literature and Snake Village, the Old Quarter with its labyrinth of streets. The movie theater where they played Mars Attacks! constantly for some reason. In the summer it would rain in torrents at exactly 4:00:00pm every day, on the dot. I spent hours trying to describe that rain. Hanoians in their multicolored ponchos riding through it.
When the nearest Tower Records is a flight away in Bangkok, you listen to what you got. It Was Written was on mad repeat. I’d spend a good page or so in letters home dissecting it.
There were only three nightclubs in Hanoi; the Redwoods burned down, and Apocalypse Now was for backpackers. We hung at the Vortex. That place was the first time I heard “Hypnotize” and “Escobar ’97.” Both were the most I’ve ever seen a dancefloor explode, everyone rising up. Biggie was already gone. It was Escobar season.
Think about this: those two singles made it across the entire world, into a just-barely-opening Communist state which was constantly cracking down on “social evils” and anything “contrary to the morals of the people.” On smuggled-in CDs, into a land whose musical taste was heavy on The Eagles and Boney M. There’s something to be said for being able to reach so many ears, move that many asses on the dancefloor. The path we all walk, starts out long, it’s like a boardwalk.
Stillviticus
Pablo’s Hippos
Money, cocaine, violence; loyalty, honor, betrayal; going out on your feet—Scarface is the ur-text of mafioso rap. What’s never acknowledged is Tony’s incredible excess and his terrible taste: that house is ridiculous, his clothes are ridiculous even for the era. And then there’s the tigers. Early on he says to Michelle Pfeiffer: “you’re like me, you’re a tiger.” Then, wedding day surprise: he bought her a couple of actual goddamn tigers, that live across from the swimming pool.
Pablo Escobar had the same problem as Scarface: what to do with all the fucking cash. On his massive estate, there was an airport, a brothel, a racetrack, a bullfighting ring, a waterpark, dinosaur statues, and a zoo. After he was killed by the police, the Columbian government donated most of the animals, but the four hippos were too hard to move, and they escaped, and fucked a lot.
Thirty years later, there’s two hundred feral hippopotami across the country, eating everything, poisoning the Magdalena River with shit, attacking people. No one wants them to be killed, it’s hard to find and sterilize them, and costs tens of millions to catch and ship them to a sanctuary.
I guess my point is: when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, you get the women. Then, you really should neuter your hippos. What they symbolize, I don’t know, you go ask one. All that flash, cash, trees for breakfast, dime sexes and Benz stretches—in the jungle, in the river, a ridiculous looming legacy.
We can do it like this if you want: “Every record after It Was Written was another of Nas’ cocaine hippos, an unexpected consequence of his early success. An ever-breeding herd of unwieldy, lumpy creatures — majestic, dangerous, exotic but also sometimes toxic and increasingly, an intractable problem which no one knew how to solve.”
Or, c’mon: Pablo’s hippos, man. Crazy.
Act II, scenes ii-x
Everything that follows lacks the narrative cohesion that defines Illmatic and the overall flex of IWW. The story outside the music is more coherent, compelling. The leak of I Am…, where once again Nas aims to cement his claim on the throne (the progression from child to man to pharoah), only to be undone by the first appearance of the internet leak as a villain, powerful and faceless, wreaking havoc on man’s plans, an implacable, unseen demiurge.
Then the epic feud with Hov, a rivalry worthy of Cain vs. Abel, Esau vs. Jacob, Romulus vs. Remus, and a thousand movies where they end up pointing guns in each other’s faces, John Woo hours. The controversy over what eventually was released as Untitled. The tawdry paparazzi years and having his worst side and the collapse of his marriage devoured by celebrity gossip mills.
In the tediously boring biopic version, I guess his weirdly extremely good venture capital investments is the uplifting conclusion—strings swell, gospel singing, roll credits. But as a great poet once said, I don’t wanna go see Nas with an orchestra at Carnegie Hall.
But musically, Nas has been trapped in an endless samsara wheel: attaining some cred, losing some cred, death and rebirth. The string of comeback albums — every album after IWW is another comeback album—is a repeated cycle of anticipation, release, and crushing disappointment.
While it’s unfair that we all kept demanding another Illmatic and didn’t get it, it’s not like Nas took any huge worthy leaps. If anything, he kept going back to the nostalgia well: Stillmatic, Street’s Disciple (the first two words he said on wax), “NY State of Mind Part II,” “Thief’s Theme,” etc. — he keeps reminding us about Illmatic as much as he wants us to forget it. Every MC references their older work; it’s part of how rap builds on itself, accretes and adds layers of meaning. But as Angus Batey pointed out, on joints like “Queens Get The Money,” Nas both plays into this (needed time alone to zone / The mack left his iPhone and his nine at home) and sneers at it (They pray, ‘please God, let him spit that “uzi in the jacket lining.”’).
No doubt, every record has top-shelf joints—in equal measure with painfully bad ones. No doubt, after losing his footing with I Am/Nastradamus, the five album run from Stillmatic to Untitled are good albums with classic tracks, but not essential albums as a whole. We could whittle them all down to a tight playlist, but a man’s flaws must be viewed alongside his triumphs. (Yes, you have to listen to “Big Girl,” but only once.)
Nas’ Ear
When hip hop is cemented in our language as Greek myths are, Nas’ Ear will replace Achilles’ Heel as a fatal flaw, an otherwise invincible warrior’s vulnerability. What served him so well on Illmatic — he chose from 60–70 beats for ten tracks — has again and again been that arrow in the foot at the Scaean Gates.
Or, in layman’s terms: Nas really fucking sucks at picking beats. He is without question one of the greatest all time MCs and without question the absolute worst at selecting tracks.
How can he not tell the goddamn difference between the “You Owe Me” beat and the “Get Down” beat? How does he manage to fuck this up on every single album? I mean, Achilles only takes that arrow once, and it’s not his fault his mom held him by the heel when dipping him in the Styx. Nas does this to us over and over. He does it like if Achilles was Tom Cruise on his ten thousand derpy timeloop fatalities in Edge of Tomorrow.
Because there is this unique emotional connection we don’t have with other MCs, we take it personal. It’s not just, “damn, this beat sucks,” it’s always sobbing “how could you do this to me, Nas?” My man, you are rich as Croesus, hire a full-time beat sommelier for God’s sake.
Oh wait: his name is Nasir but he calls himself Nas because he has no ear. Wow. That’s stupid as hell.
The origin myth of Nas’ Ear is unlike Achilles’ heel. Because Nas, as a young MC choosing the weapons with which to make his mark, chose a council of beatmakers instead of allying himself with just one. He chose to forego the brotherhood of the traditional duo/trio, like Gang Starr or Run-DMC, that grounding and keeping your head straight and consistent sound a partnership provides. He had to go his own way, blaze his own path, the Fool’s Journey.
In Greek mythology, the journey to the afterlife has two parts, katabasis and anabasis: traveling down and traveling up. Nas has been stuck on this elevator since before the turn of the millennium, more than three quarters of his career. His ear is the opposite of Orpheus’ lyre. Without a Virgil, a psychopompos, an Anubis, he gets lost in the underworld. And by underworld I mean the hell of all these shitty, awful beats he has made us wade through and endure for decades to get to the good stuff.
Act III: King’s Diseases
Again, Shakespeare couldn’t have written it better: the aging king, long in exile, has a young, ambitious chancer slide into his court with promises to restore his former glory, reclaim his crown. In keeping with today’s genderfluid pronouns, he is called Hit-Person.
It’s weird Nas called these records King’s Disease, since that’s gout. This tracks with Nas being a Shakespeare character, historical royalty. But gout is a painful condition aristocrats used to get because they drank too much booze and ate too much meat. It’s a disgusting illness caused by overindulgence, being too rich, too lazy, flagrant excess and gorging, appetite without restraint. That’s how I feel about these records, but Nas titled them because “The king gets what he wants, but too much of that”— it’s a caution to himself. But…why not call these records Part of a Well-Balanced Breakfast I, II and III?
In the Major Arcana, Nas has reached card XIV: Temperance—balance, moderation. Purified, so in pouring from the silver cup to the golden cup, nothing is lost.
I am glad he has reached that state of balance. But these albums suck ass.
I think about this line all the time. I’ve been to Paris twice in the past couple of years and I was mumbling it to myself every twenty minutes. It comes to mind for no reason; whenever something is wholly incomprehensible, staggeringly yet genius dumb. Let’s put it in big billboard-sized letters:
My dog bought a plane, said “let’s go to Paris”
That’s where baguettes are from,
French bread that’s long and narrow.
There are…six of these Hit-Person albums now? They’re footnotes, ephemera. As Rapswell said, the beats taste like gas station sushi. They’re The Matrix Resurrections of Nas records: nobody wanted them, they’re way too late, they’re professionally put together but painfully empty and wholly unnecessary. In this house we do not speak of them.
The Sun
The four year break between Untitled and Life Is Good felt longer, but it was his longest hiatus over fourteen years. For me, this is the end of the story. The boy from Illmatic is a grown man, who has lived a lot and gotten a lot and lost a lot. We open with that sepia-tinged, old-beyond-his-years child’s face with the projects bleeding through, the sound of the subway grinding across the tracks. We close with the older man with his lost wife’s wedding dress, in a Gatsby/Scarface white suit, on a leather banquette in the VIP section, and assumedly the sound of clinking glasses, glasses filled with whatever high-class liquor he is being paid to endorse (HenNASsey? Jesus fucking Christ).
Life Is Good hangs together as an album that’s part of the tale—closing a loop of art- and myth-making as opposed to record-making and chart-topping. (Yeah, it has plenty skips, it’s a Nas record.)
Within this illdungsroman or opera cycle or whatever, we start with “Genesis.” We could end with Life Is Good’s last track, “Where’s The Love?” At times I window watch at the Wynn hotel. Lots of thinking happens in life, will I win or fail? This pairs to “Memory Lane,” way back in QB—my window faces shootouts, drug overdoses, live amongst no roses.
But for me, the last Nas song is “Beautiful Life,” from Lost Tapes 2 but left over from Life Is Good. He’s often tried and mostly failed to be inspiring, reflective, celebratory. But this joint is coming from the heart, that original heart he tore open in 1994. This is the end of the story. This is the last Nas song. Let all mortal flesh now keep silence.
The final card in the Major Arcana, the end of The Fool’s Journey, is XXI: The World. Whose world is it? In the end, it wasn’t his. He hasn’t, or won’t, complete the path to its end, its fullness. The penultimate card is XX: Judgement. Nas has faced an endless level of scrutiny for thirty years. His work will be listened to and examined and written about for decades more. He’s already faced judgement.
The card he has reached is the one before that, XIX: The Sun—happiness, success, attainment. Let the light in. Life is good.
In the end, after all the debating, hair-pulling, frustrations and letdowns, there is a huge and sometimes amazing body of work. Yes, we wanted another Illmatic, and we didn’t get it. Did we really want him encased in that amber cover forever? And there could never be another: works like that happen but once, everything coming together just right, at the exact moment. Time is illmatic.
If anything, we all wanted Nas to succeed, to be his best — that was all we wanted. Nas never did rule the world and everything in it (but he probably did push the Q4 Infinit). We didn’t walk right up to the sun, hand in hand. But life didn’t take him under. He found out before his time was out.
