Anniversaries: The Lost Tapes II by Nas

As if he hadn't aged a day, Nas’ sequel to the beloved ‘The Lost Tapes’ may not match its predecessor, but it’s still a good compilation.

Courtesy of Mass Appeal Records.

If you read the producer list for The Lost Tapes II, you may think that Nas wants to spit directly into the face of the rap scene that this “Nas has no beat taste” rumor is actually hair-raising nonsense. Musically and in terms of beat aesthetics, large parts of the albums from whose sessions this collection of leftover tracks are said to have been created eat dust against the tracks on The Lost Tapes II. With instrumentals from the feathers of Pete Rock, The Alchemist, Pharrell Williams, DJ Dahi, the RZA, and Kanye West, he delivers one of his most coherent and accurate longplayers of this millennium.

It is classic Nas on all fronts. He opens with hungry battle rap and reckoning with the scene, sometimes on a bulged boy choir (“No Bad Energy”), sometimes on an extravagant jazz piano flip (“Jarreau of Rap”), and sometimes on simple but damn effective soul samples (“Lost Freestyle”). It’s about the pressure on his shoulders as a scene veteran and the doubts about his status, which his changeable catalog repeatedly made loud. This Nas here is reflected and hungry. It’s about tops at the highest level, technically savvy, and close to the streets of New York.

Nevertheless, the middle hangs briefly when Nas exposes himself to the typical weaknesses of his discography and text storytellers, the necessity of which he cannot explain himself. “Tanasia” may shine in terms of sound thanks to RZA production, but only the supporting line in the refrain, “Tanasia, Tanasia/If you’re not from Queensbridge, then you must be from Asia,” is bursting with exoticism and over-candidates objectification of women, which not only dusts but seems awkward and somewhat embarrassing here.

Even the two subsequent narrative tracks, “Royalty” and “Who Are You,” do not precisely impress with density or fire. These typical songs arise more from the impulse that storytelling is considered an emblem of the skill. One can assume that Nas digs particularly deep here and there with this premise to find something he can tell about. But it is precisely the incoherent story about an old neighbor on “Who Are You” who joins the “white society” with education and money that sends aimlessly and without a clear imperative.

But if you reach the center of The Lost Tapes II, Nas noticeably shifts into a higher gear. The barrage of the last titles especially comes with so much firepower around the corner that you sometimes even wonder whether these numbers can keep up with the Nas of the mid-nineties.

“Queensbridge Politics” brings Pete Rock back so classic with keys that if this instrumental had been released in 1993, it would be a certified classic today. Nas’ Flow on it is endless, entangled, and winding with the soulful tribute to Prodigy. You could quickly think he never dropped the pen after Illmatic.

“You Mean the World to Me” takes sweet, homely synth tones from Kanye West’s MPC and shows a sensitive Nas with an exciting story about relationship dynamics; so lo-fi, you can feel how anime girls do their homework in various YouTube streams. In addition, there is another RZA track with “Highly Favored,” bars massacre as on the Alchemist-produced “It Never Ends,” and an optimistic closer with “Beautiful Life.”

There are so many hits and a few average songs, and Nas shows with this collection of tracks that, in terms of flow and word violence, hardly anyone still shakes his throne. The maturation may be missing, which is a natural development of a human being. As much as Nas also creates musical doubts with The Lost Tapes II, he hardly develops his character and worldview in a way that is different from the twenty-year-old New Yorker who put Illmatic into the world at the time. He is dogged, partly conspiratorial, and without context in the current scene.

This respect is probably balm for everyone worried about the craft's status in 2019. Nas is still here, and if he wants, he can still rap as if he had yet to age a day. But he can also text as if he had yet to age a day. Thus, The Lost Tapes II remains the musical time capsule when it was probably intended anyway. It is not a new chapter in the book of Nasir Jones, but it is word sport at the highest level with one of the most top-class producer squads in hip-hop history. If you expect exactly that, you can be satisfied here.