Nas Reflects on His Life in 20 Songs with Rolling Stone (long read)..

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#6

"Nas is Coming"


It was the middle of the East-West war. Dre had left Death Row and I was a big fan of Dre’s and Dre liked my stuff.

A few years before, I was new and I went out and performed at this club that Prince owned in Los Angeles at the time. The club was hitting. It's right before the album dropped and I came out with a glass of Hennessy and a cigar,

and I said my stuff and I left and I think that impressed Dre. He saw the L.A. audience reacting well to it too,

and we talked and he was still at Death Row at this point.

Years later, I’m in the business and we're right in the middle of this East Coast-West Coast shit.

Dre just wanted to make music; he wasn’t really caught up in that shit. At the end of the day,

he's riding for his team, but he got to a point where there was internal beef on his side,

and he wanted to work and I wanted to work. The East and West wasn’t really too happy about that,

but we wanted to work together and "Nas Is Coming" was the first thing we did.

The whole East Coast-West Coast thing, I was just watching what was going on.

Tupac showed me a lot of respect on the intro to Makaveli—he called me the leader of the East Coast,

so me and him both had a mutual respect, and I didn’t want any East Coast-West Coast beef at all.

#7

"Hate Me Now"




After my first record, they were like,

"You can’t do it again. He can’t do this. He can’t do that. He’s not as big as this one.

He’s not as big as that one. He’ll never be around again. He’s too grimy. He’s too street.

He has a bad following. People around him start trouble."

I had a bad rap, so I blew that away with the second album. So now they mad at that,

and found a different reason to be mad at me.

So "Hate Me Now" was the appropriate record at the time.

#8

"Nastradamus"


The song was a EPMD sample and I just freestyled it. I was riding high off multi-platinum sales off I Am,

and just didn’t want to do anything but freestyle that single and put it out. We had a concept to make the video 3D,

but we didn’t figure out how to get all the glasses to people and time was against us.

Glasses were made, but obviously not enough for every household, so we fucked that one up a little bit.

On that album, there’s a couple of songs that have a certain sound to it that doesn’t sound like anything else I’ve done. And it was a gray area in my life and that album represents that gray area.

It was personal stuff that I'd rather not elaborate on. But I have nothing against that album.

I Am, [released earlier that year], was originally supposed to be a double album,

but the songs leaked and that killed it for me. I didn’t want to touch it.

I hated that because no one’s supposed to hear a song before it’s time, so if that happens,

I didn't fuck with the record. It’s over. The record never existed. So I went and started brand new music.

At the time, my brother Jungle was managing Noriega and Nature,

and he was getting a lot of beats from guys that were just blasting in the business,

like Dame Grease and Swizz Beatz, and those beats was ahead of their time and I didn’t understand them that well.

Then DMX and Nori really made them happen

and I was able to go grab Dame Grease, [who produced four songs from Nastradamus] and be like,

"Yo, work with me." The Nostradamus thing was about the end of the world being the year 2000,

so my record would be dropping right toward the end of the world.

#9

"Got Ur Self A..."


This one was just so huge to me and my then-manager Steve Stoute.

The Sopranos was our favorite thing and we were so happy that HBO gave us that.

[The song sampled Alabama 3's "Woke Up This Morning," the show's theme song.]

I love Goodfellas, but now it went from the movie theater to your household.

I was praying because I wanted to be the first one to use that sample because at that point,

everybody was watching The Sopranos.

We thought there would be nothing cooler than to have their theme song as my theme song,

and we were so happy to use it. Some people think that had something to do with the Jay Z beef,

but that one had nothing to do with any rapper. It was about who could use that sample first.

#10

"2nd Childhood"


How many grownups do you see every day that still act like children? It’s a shame.

In life, with your woman, your man, your family,

there’s grownups who you expect so much more from are just really nothing more than a child.

They're big kids and these are people with power I’m talking about, so "2nd Childhood" was very important.

 

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#11

"Poppa Was a Playa"


I was really just feeding and channeling the Temptations' "Papa Was a Rolling Stone."

When I was a kid, I had a friend and his stepdad's name was Papa. This friend is dead now,

but he didn’t really like Papa that much because Papa was a dope fiend.

When the Temptations song came on, he sang it a little extra.

We were kids at this point and that stayed with me forever.

My pop was not a dope fiend—my pop was my pop—so I talked about him.

This was also one of Kanye’s first production. I didn’t even know him at the time.

He just came through via someone else.

#12

"Last Real Niggaa Alive"


Yeah, sometimes I tell stories, man,

and I’ll use my imagination just for the sake of putting a good rhyme together and a good song.

But sometimes, like with this one, the songs are just very literal.

[The song references, in part, Nas' public feud with Jay Z in the early 2000s.]

Tupac and Biggie never lived to see the impact that they were going to have.

If [Jay and I] learned anything from that, it was that this had to be different.

We owed it—not just for me and him, but to everybody in rap—to those huge,

game-changing artists to carry on this thing the right way. It was good that it never got to violence.

#13

"Dance"


[Nas' mother, Fannie Ann Jones, passed away before the release of God's Son.

The rapper wrote this song as a dedication to her.]

My brother can’t listen to that song to this day. But it was an easy one to write for me.

[Pauses] It’s an easy one. [Pauses] I had to get it out.

#14

"Bridging the Gap"


I recorded this one with my pop [jazz cornetist Olu Dara].

My mom had passed and I was trying to... my pop was always my man,

so I wanted to make sure we did things while we’re still here.

[Producer] Salaam [Remi] was all for a challenge and always up for something different.

And Salaam was real cool with my pop, so he just knew which way to go.

We wrote this one together.

#15

"Thief's Theme"


We just took a line from "The World is Yours"—You know,

"Understandable smooth shit that murderers move with/The thief’s theme/Play me at night/They won’t act right".

That’s the type of music and vibe we were looking for. I wanted to zero in on that and make a thief’s theme.

And not for real thieves. I hate thieves. I hate thieves, rapists and pedophiles more than any people in the world. But "Thief’s Theme" is an attitude. It’s not literal. It’s an underworld. It’s not popular.

It’s not pop music. It’s music for guys who live in the underworld.

 

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#16

"Hip Hop Is Dead"


I was surprised no one named their album this before me.

Bushwick Bill of Geto Boys had worn it on a T-shirt at one point.

Tribe Called Quest talked about it in an interview I read about years ago.

Outkast even mentions something in that area at some point. It was a topic within the hip hop community,

so there had to be an album about it. And I felt like at the time it was needed.

Will.i.am produced this and I thought, "What’s better than to say hip-hop is dead than with will.i.am,

who’s a genius but not necessarily known as a 'real' hip-hop guy, even though he is a hip-hop guy."

To hip-hop people, will.i.am is over there somewhere,

so to get him to re-do the "Thief’s Theme" beat, where—I don’t know if he knew when he played it for me,

—but I thought it was funny to have "Thief’s Theme" as a single on the last album,

and then to do the same track with the same beat. Because shit is dead,

so it doesn’t even matter what beat you use. So yeah, it was big-time funny to me. I was loving the criticism.

#17

"Who Killed It?"




It was all about James Cagney. I got caught up in all his movies—The Roaring Twenties,

really all of his gangster movies—and he’s one of my favorite characters of all time, ever.

When he did the gangster movies is just the best shit.

So I would play around and talk like him in the studio just for fun.

We didn't plan on doing it as a song, but we just did.

#18

"Not Going Back"


You know in The Godfather 3—and forgive me for making so many movie references,

there’s a scene when Michael Corleone says, "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in."

And that’s a moment I think a lot of people deal with. People are always trying to focus on moving forward.

That scene resonated with me big time,

so "Not Going Back" is that scene. I didn’t get it from that movie, but it’s the same thing.

I was just using the movie as a way to see what I’m saying.

You’re struck with those moments in your life where you don’t want to be pulled backwards,

and you feel that you're being pulled from all different directions, so "Not Going Back" was that kind of thing.

#19

"Untitled"


I feel like revolutionaries should be rewarded. I don’t think they feel that way because they’re fighting,

but I think that us, the ones they’re fighting for...

Say, for example, some revolutionary that died like a martyr, Che, was wounded instead of died. Say JFK was wounded instead of dying. I feel like these were people for the people,

even though JFK was a president and you don’t really know what’s going on behind the doors in the White House.

I just feel like they deserve some type of pension from the people.

I wish I could bring them back here and raise money to put them in a beach house and say,

"Man, you did everything. You earned it, man."

There’s people who live and then people who really live and those people deserve it.

#20

"No Introduction"


A lot of times, when you do a record or a new album, you’re kind of re-introducing yourself to the rap world,

or the music world, so the first song had to be reminding people like, let’s go through a story with me on who I am, you know? I wanted to lay it all out. The self-censoring stuff were lines that fell on the editing floor. I’d think some things, then go, "Nah, can’t reveal that." I exaggerated a little bit. Say, for example, "syrup sandwiches and sugar water" was a thing that a lot of kids in my neighborhood ate. I didn’t grow up needing sugar water. There were days when there was nothing there and groceries are on their way and we remembered a story: some of our poorer friends had syrup sandwiches and we tried it and I hated it. But I remember kids swearing by these terrible, makeshift meals, and it was memories like that that wound up in the music.

 

[illedout]

 

[Built 4 cuban linx]

THE GOAT..

nice read

 

[dalyricalbandit]

Dope

 

[Listencloser]

Indeed.

 

[BelovedAfeni]

Boooooooooooooo this man

 

[supergangster]

Pac said that Nas the leader in the East. Fuck i'm so mad that people overrated Biggie so much, Nas always been the king

 

[qawshun]

I'm glad he spoke on that iam double disk shit, damn if that would've came out lie out was suppose to Smh

 

[deakino]

Nas is that dude.

 

[Me1971]

Pac said that Nas the leader in the East. Fuck i'm so mad that people overrated Biggie so much, Nas always been the king

Lol yeah it's obvious that Pac had a huge amount of respect for Nas.

 

[Elzo69Renaissance]

Dope read. Never knew Kanye did Poppa Was A Playa.

Ghost producing for D Dot s bitch ass

 

[The_Man]

great read