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Well, the thing about The Lost Tapes (a collection of mostly stuff that was left off other albums) is that it confirmed what many people had already suspected - that Nas' biggest problem is the fact that his taste in his own material has often been fucking appalling.
To illustrate, a specific example: just before the I Am... album came out, Tim Westwood was playing various cuts off the album on his radio show - the brilliant Premier-produced single 'Nas Is Like', the string-drenched, brooding 'Small World', the bombastic and silly as hell but still lotsa fun 'Hate Me Now'... *and* the completely amazing 'Drunk By Myself'. Now, at the time, this was one of the most jaw-dropping Nas tracks I'd ever heard, and it still is. It's completely nihilistic, riddled with self-hatred, achingly beautiful - it's like the hip-hop equivalent of the darkest, grimmest piece of self-pitying rock music you can think of, except really really good. It's brink-of-disaster music. And it was supposed to be on his new album.
So, off I go to the record shop once I Am... was released, and I thought "that's funny, there's not a track with that name listed, but what the hell, rappers are always giving song funny titles that have nothing to do with the lyrics". I buy it, take it home. Listen to each track in turn. And it's *not there*. Apparently the reason for this, I later discovered, was that bootleg copies of the album had been doing the rounds and so, fearful of lost sales, Nas changed the tracklisting of the album, taking off 'Drunk By Myself' and other tracks (including the great 'Blaze A 50', also on The Lost Tapes), and replacing them with others.
What others? Well, presumably the cringingly, painfully bad 'K-I-S-S-I-N-G', the laughable bandwagon-jumping 'Big Things', the utterly rubbish 'Dr Knockboots' - ye gads. Awful stuff. Terrible, terrible tracks which turn what could have been a return to form into a very, very patchy album indeed. And then the next one was even worse.
However, rumours suggest that 'God's Son' is a proper return to form - haven't heard it yet though, but will keep an ear open... |
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