The exception was Nas’s collaboration with the Clan, and in 1995 he became the first MC from outside that group to appear on one of their records. Yet the artists were never really part of a cohesive scene, with beefs between them more apparent than any sense of comradeship or regional unity. Together they helped New York rap re-establish itself after a period of gangsta-funk-derived dominance for Los Angeles, and before the Dirty South entered the frame and proved hip-hop had more than two regional power centres. Nas’s rise came in parallel with Biggie and Wu-Tang Clan, and a little ahead of Jay Z. Raekwon feat Ghostface Killah and Nas – Verbal Intercourse
There’s nothing like it anywhere else in his discography, in hip-hop, or in music full stop.ģ.
The writing is never less than astonishing, from the disarming way he tells his incarcerated friend of birth, death and infidelity in the first verse (“When the cops came you should’ve slid to my crib / Fuck it, black – no time for lookin’ back: it’s done / Plus - congratulations! You know you got a son? / I heard he looks like ya – why don’t your lady write ya?”) to the atmospheric detail of that closing conversation over a shared joint with the kid back in Queensbridge (“Shorty’s laugh was cold-blooded as he spoke so foul / Only 12, tryin’ to tell me that he liked my style / Then I rose, wipin’ the blunt’s ash from my clothes / then froze, only to blow the herb’s smoke through my nose”). The beat, built from a thumb-piano riff sampled from a 1975 Heath Brothers LP, frames two verses constructed as letters from Nas to friends in prison, while the closing stanza relates a conversation between the rapper and a pre-teen drug-dealer, the elder man – still barely out of childhood himself – lamenting the hardening of the times and the steel that was forming in the hearts of the residents of New York’s crack-ravaged public-housing projects. This collaboration with Q-Tip is a standout even on an album as uniformly excellent as Illmatic. But it would be perverse not to include at least one of its bejewelled moments. There’s a temptation when constructing a list like this to omit it entirely, on the basis that anyone interested enough to read about the artist would already know it, love it and consider it so essential that it can perhaps be taken for granted. The album cast a shadow over the rapper’s subsequent career, with every new record immediately held up for comparison with his first, and inevitably found wanting. It is hailed as one of the genre’s touchstone releases – indeed, it’s sometimes cited as the greatest hip-hop album of all time, and the claim is difficult to dismiss. Nas’s debut was two years in the making and it changed hip-hop industry thinking, ushering in the era of multiple producers working on a single LP.
The rest of this list could be filled with the nine full-length tracks from Illmatic, and few would complain. This may not be his finest verse, but he contributes fully to a great if oft-overlooked record, and as an example of the state of the art he was about to upend and transcend, it gives an instructive sense of context for what was to follow.
If it was Snoop who has since gone public with his adoration of British TV comic Benny Hill, Nas put the concept into lyrical practice: “This is Nas, kid, you know how it runs,” he raps “I’m wavin’ automatic guns at nuns / Stickin’ up the preachers in church – I’m a stone crook / Serial killer who works by the phone book.” Relationships were duly forged: not just with Serch, who started shopping Nas’s demos around New York, and went on to help mastermind his 1994 debut, but with Tone who, as half of the Trackmasters production duo, would work with Nas repeatedly throughout the decade. At that time, Jones was still going by the name Nasty Nas, and his verse – a follow-on from his Main Source turn – traded on the same cartoonish villain persona. Part of the getting-to-know-each-other process was this B-side, a joyously carefree slice of irreverent late-golden-era rap which found all four MCs on fine, rambunctious, if occasionally very off-colour form. The former 3rd Bass rapper was making moves as a music mogul that would eventually see him installed as head of the Wild Pitch indie that had released Main Source’s debut by 1992 he’d established a management company, Serchlight, and courted the Queensbridge teenager as a client.
He’d announced his presence with a verse on Main Source’s Live at the Barbecue on the 1991 album Breakin’ Atoms, but an even bigger break came for Nasir Jones when he hooked up with MC Serch. MC Serch feat Nas, Red Hot Lover Lover Tone and Chubb Rock – Back to the Grill