New York’s Son Brings It All Back Home
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York rapper Nas has finally made an album that doesn’t hide in the shadows of his classic 1994 debut,”Illmatic.” Since that prodigious start, the Queensbridge native’s six subsequent albums have tried to straddle two worlds: pop’s crossover marketability and the insiders’ world of hip-hop’s life on the streets. It was an arranged marriage that produced a handful of radio hits, but didn’t complement Nas, who is much better at rhyming what he sees and feels and letting the mainstream find him.
The man formerly known as Nasir Jones tries to do just that with his eighth album and first for the Def Jam label, “Hip-Hop Is Dead.” It’s not as flawless as “Illmatic”— few albums are — but even when it’s merely average, “Hip-Hop Is Dead” is still better than a majority of the booty shake and trap music out there.
If the album’s title feels like a line being drawn in the sand, it is. Earlier this year, Nas announced in blog reports that he was going to name his new album a racially charged pejorative common in rap lyrics. “Hip-Hop Is Dead” is less flagrantly volatile — at least it can be printed in newspapers and said over the radio — but no less confrontational. On the album’s 16 lean tracks, which run just over an hour in total, Nas tries to dismantle hip-hop’s current stars of crunk, hyphy, and Dirty South with his own brand of defiantly vibrant New York hip-hop.
And he starts right out of the gate. On the opener, “Money Over Bull—-” Nas athletically navigates a mouthful of aggressive rhymes, castigating rappers who favor the fashionably superficial gangster lifestyles over speaking what they know. It’s the usual elder-to-youngster admonishment: “You a kid, you don’t live what you rap about.”The beat is a stripped-down drum kick accented by a ghost of a piano line, sounding more like late-1980s grit than modernday pomp and flash. It’s not only a nostalgic touch, but a production decision to reinforce his lyrical temperament — that this so-called “old school” approach remains effective and pertinent. The song is a call to arms, “Join me in war / many will live, many will mourn.”
Nas is clearly concerned with the respect-your-elders spleen that has afflicted rap since its mid-1990s explosion into big business: Selling is more important than craft, drugs and violence are to be used as lyrical props, the triumph of the pose trumps the art form. With “Hip-Hop Is Dead,” he tries to poke holes in that marketing façade by returning to the basics: tight beats, deft wordplay, and a muscular delivery.
But this approach doesn’t always succeed on “Hip-Hop Is Dead.” Nas’s best moments have always married a hustler’s tough-minded, streets’-eye view to poetic wordplay and political insight — in short, when he seamlessly combines 1980s old school with early 1990s new school. As such, this album’s straight-ahead, hard-knock tracks, such as “You Can’t Kill Me” and “Carry on Tradition,” don’t hit the ears with the sort of growling fluidity of his elastic flow in the funky “Where Are They Now?,” a historical overview of lost MCs and groups of the past 20 years.
Fortunately, Nas taps into his strengths on “Hold Down the Block,” which courses along a warm wash of 1970s-style, lazy afternoon soul as he offers a street corner’s view of a neighborhood on the edge of collapse. Kanye West provides the gospeldelic shimmy of “Let There Be Light,” backing Nas as he skewers rappers who vacantly lionize hip-hop’s golden years, as if merely mentioning the names of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls puts them in the same lineage.
The album’s title track and centerpiece, produced by the Black Eyed Peas’ inescapable Will.i. am, is a rousing burst of adrenalin, threaded out of the unmistakable central riff from Iron Butterfly’s “In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida” and the head-bobbing bounce of the Incredible Bongo Band’s “Apache.” The samples combine to form a thunderous hammer behind one of Nas’s fastest-paced deliveries, in which he quickly announces his New York roots — “Whenever, if ever, I roll up, it’s sewn up / Any ghetto will tell ya Nas helped grow us up.”
“Everybody sound the same, commercialize the game / Reminiscing when it wasn’t all business,” he barks later on in the track. He’s not being curmudgeonly — Nas admits that the art form has survived from “turntables to mp3s” — he’s merely offering a reminder of how vital the music can be when raised from the soul. “I’m lookin’ over my shoulder / It’s about 80 people from my hood that showed up,” he tosses in just before the song’s abrupt end. This rally cry may not rekindle a push toward a more classic hip-hop sound, but Nas’s aesthetic move has undeniably reminded him that he remains one of New York’s most necessary MCs.