If the songs are good enough, just you, your main instrument eg a guitar or piano, and maybe the slightest bit of embellishment from a harmonica or xylophone or something will be enough.

Very few artists have been able to write songs that are good enough.

On one level, there’s not a lot to this album. It’s just Rick Rubin being Johnny Cash’s first producer since Sam Phillips to realise less is more with this guy. You can’t beat just hearing the guy alone in his living room with his guitar (or at most with a very low key backing band like the Tennessee Two/Three). Aside from the production choices, it’s just a fairly standard Johnny Cash album - the same sort of mix of covers, commissioned songs and originals ... read more

It's enjoyable with a few really strong cuts, if not something which will ever be high priority in my Nas rotation. Could have done with better production. Honestly the main takeaway is that Nas sounds good trading bars with a singer on what aren't really traditional hip-hop beats. Which just makes me mourn the Nas x Amy Winehouse album we very likely would have gotten had she lived.

This isn't what I signed up for, Nas.

I came to your discography looking for the dizzying contrast between the greatness of Illmatic, It Was Written etc, and the shittiness of colossal miscalculations like Nastradamus.

This is just kind of... whatever? Pleasantly in one ear, out the other, then immediately forgotten. Boring!

Is Jeopardy > Oh My Darling Don't Cry > Blockbuster Night, Pt 1 > Close Your Eyes (And Count To Fuck) the greatest, most face-blistering four song run the greatest, face-blisteringest opening to any hip-hop album ever?

Maybe!

The rest of it is good to great, but god DAMN. God DAMN. That fucking opening.

A quick peruse of the track ratings shows that every individual song has a user rating equal to or higher than the overall user score for the album. Which to me indicates it's being heavily underrated as a whole project. Honestly, I think it's close to perfect - no weak cuts, and more of them than not are all time great rap songs.

Why the underrating? I guess you could accuse it of being a bit "more of the same": the end result of album-to-album refinement on the part of ... read more

It's good. I'm not sure it's *great*, or the best hip hop album of the 2020's so far, as I've seen many suggest.

I can't help but think it's being just a liiiiiittle bit glazed because of how strongly it evokes our *idea* of what a "great album" sounds like. It's big, it's grand. The orchestrals are so lush. IMO though the songwriting can be a mixed bag - the first few tracks are strong, others like Little Q Pt 2 and How Did You Get Here ... read more

Hot take.

Are you sitting down?

This is better than Stillmatic. I don't think it's even debateable.

Like Stillmatic, here we have a handful of fantastic songs (particularly Still Dreaming, Black Republican and the title track) surrounded by less essential album cuts. The difference is that the less good tracks on Stillmatic are all at best mid, but the album filler here is almost uniformly pretty good. Yes, even Who Killed It? It’s funny! “Black rapper doing an ... read more

Title track + Thief’s Theme are fire & there are some good ideas in general (ironically, I low key fw some of the derided “Nas be fucking!” joints on side two) but overall this is definitely one of Nas’ weakest projects. I admire the ambition, clearly hot on the heels of his 2001-02 return from the dead he wanted to really cap things off, and a double album is often how artists will do that. But honestly I don’t think there are enough good tracks in here to ... read more

I see a lot of people identifying this as top 3 in Nas’ discography and I don’t just see it. I’ve also seen people suggest it’s better than The Lost Tapes due to it being more cohesive which, again, I wonder what people are smoking. I guarantee if you gave 10 people unfamiliar with Nas this and Lost Tapes and had them do a blind listen, 9 of them would identify Stillmatic as a collection of looseys and B sides.

IMO this gets a bit overrated for two reasons, 1. What it ... read more

Jesus fucking Christ Nas 😂

A lot of Nas’ albums are underrated. This isn’t one of them.

Should have just released the original version, even with all the bootlegs floating around. Should have thought about posterity rather than the now. Aside from 3-4 strong cuts, this is rushed & just not good.

The “Nas sold out!” reaction to this was ridiculous at the time (yes, the dude made some mild concessions to make the record more commercially viable, but this is otherwise a genre where sales success and business acumen are celebrated, why is Nas the only guy who can’t try to make a bit more money? And in what way did he dumb his lyrics down to pander to rubes & casuals? Did he do it at all?) and it becomes more and more ridiculous with each passing year as the genre is ... read more

The "Nas picks bad beats" take was always horseshit, but what's pretty inarguable about Nas is that he's just a terrible EP of his own shit. Case in point: this compilation of tracks which were deemed not good enough for I Am... and Stillmatic is one of the best albums of his career (it's honestly my answer for "what's the best Nas album besides Illmatic?"). The 12 tracks on this are better than the best 12 songs across the two albums on which they failed ... read more

Really underrated. Way more consistent than it's given credit for, with production which has held up very well & only one genuinely bad song, and the highs are very very high. Made You Look is maybe the best single he ever put out, Last Real N***a Alive is one of his best storytelling joints, and Book Of Rhymes is one of his signature high concept tracks. On top of that you see the maturity and depth of feeling which wouldn't return to his work again until Life Is Good and the Hit ... read more

Typhoid Curtis the patient zero of boring mumble shit. Genuinely may be the worst thing to happen to the genre ever. If you think this is good you need therapy.

The best rapper who got murdered in the 90’s.

Pretty much impossible to say anything that hasn’t already been said. This is boom bap and bars at its best. This is perfection. This is hip-hop.

Comfort food for regressive, backwards-looking Nas fans who have a terminal case of Illmatic memberberries and are begging for him to return to just spitting bars over that grimy 90’s boom bap production style. Since I am one of those people, I loved this.

If there’s a tragedy to Nas’ career, it’s just that his flow & lyricism are *so fucking good* and *so much better* than any other aspect of his songwriting & general artistry, that pretty much nothing he can ... read more

Probably the most emotionally complex hip-hop album ever made, and the genre’s ultimate pleb/dumbass filter.