This is like 15 years too late. Im a Preemo fan but his production is not the same anymore. Hopefully he will prove me wrong tho

Where would Daz be without Snoop.  If Snoop woulda left his ass in Oklahoma. 

...I know ya'll love Dogg Food, everyone loves it, great, classic, flawless album.  But did you know that shit only went platinum cause people thought it was Snoop's group?  My brother still doesn't know who Daz and Kurupt are.   But everyone knows who Snoop is.  That shit sold cause of Snoop.

That doesn't give Snoop the right to take Daz shit, but Daz should be more careful and greatful to his big cousins.  Why can't he just say,

"I love Snoop and I owe my career to him, and that's my big cousin.  But I can't give over my shit.  That's my ownership and I don't want to sell. So with all the love and respect I have to say no."

Shit, Hittman verses on 2001 kill any of Games raps.

That song 'Dont Trip', Game tried so hard to out-shine Cube and Dre, that he spat two try hard verses last and first...the OGs should of slapped him for fuckin up the song like that.

Meanwhile the Royals just landed a free agent for 5 Million dollars.  A back up, platoon player.  It's not fair.  You big city markets got all the money, how can we compete?

yeah that's always been the problem.  Why the other major sports have one and baseball doesn't?

It's a miracle the Royals were decent the last couple years.  But how can they sustain it when their competition is going out and getting players and they are sitting on their ass.

How the fuck do you convert to being a flat earther??

How Nas and DJ Premier Got the Last Say

Mass Appeal spent 2025 reminding the world why New York rap still matters. Ending the series with Light‑Years is their way of saying: the people who built the era get to tell you what it meant.



It is late autumn in New York, and there is a feeling in the air that doesn’t quite match the season. This is not the chill that sweeps through the avenues or the rush of tourists to Rockefeller Center. It’s the hum of elders stepping back into the studio with a steady stream of announcements and listening sessions rippling through social media feeds. You can walk past a comic‑book convention and glimpse Nas standing alongside Marvel artists, smiling under a logo that looks as if it were pulled from a Wu‑Tang album cover. You might scroll past a video of Slick Rick thanking Nas for giving him a stage at the Tribeca Festival, or catch a clip of Havoc of Mobb Deep explaining why he finally agreed to unearth Prodigy’s unreleased vocals. It feels like living in a city that is both returning to the 1990s and creating something that has never existed before.

From June through December 2025, Mass Appeal’s Legend Has It… series slowly unfolded, one record at a time. It began with Slick Rick’s Victory, his first album in 26 years. Then came Raekwon’s The Emperor’s New Clothes, Ghostface Killah’s Supreme Clientele II, Mobb Deep’s Infinite, Big L’s Harlem’s Finest: Return of the King, and De La Soul’s Cabin in the Sky. Each project carried its own weight: Big L’s record stitched together a 1990s freestyle with new contributions from Nas and Method Man; Infinite transformed Prodigy’s unreleased verses into songs that sound as if he and Havoc never left the studio; Cabin in the Sky turned grief for the late Trugoy into a meditation on the passing of time. The label said the mission as “preserving the past, celebrating the present, and pushing hip-hop into the future.” Watching these records arrive month after month created the sense of a shared universe—one that honors the Bronx and Harlem as much as it caters to a global audience.

That universe is about to close with an album that has existed as a rumor for nearly two decades. Nas and DJ Premier, the rapper and producer whose work on 1994’s Illmatic helped define the sound of New York rap, will release Light-Years this Friday. We do not yet know what the album will sound like, and for now, the tracklist is less important than what the project represents. In a rare interview, Nas talked about the series as a reminder of hip-hop’s pureness, saying that the 2025 run has felt “like 1995 all over again” on Rolling Stone with Andre Gee, while insisting that the music is forward-looking. The concept of Light-Years plays on that idea. A light-year is not a measure of time but of distance—specifically, how far light travels in a year. To observe a star many light-years away is to look deep into the past because its light takes so long to reach us. The title suggests that Nas and Premier are sending a signal across decades. The songs may originate in 2006 or 2024, but the moment of reception is happening now, at the end of a year devoted to letting New York’s elder statespeople speak.

From the outside, Legend Has It… might look like a resurgence from our pioneers, but its rollout reveals a deliberate narrative. Victory, the opener, reminded those who aren’t aware that Slick Rick’s storytelling remains unmatched despite its brevity. It included a short film produced by Idris Elba and appearances from Nas, Giggs, and Busta Rhymes, positioning Rick as an elder and a contemporary. Raekwon’s The Emperor’s New Clothes leaned into mafioso imagery and an updated sound with Swizz Beatz and the J.U.S.T.I.C.E. League. Ghostface’s Supreme Clientele II revisited a long-awaited sequel to his 2000 classic, with contributions from Nas, Raekwon, and GZA. Mobb Deep’s Infinite confronted death head-on by mixing Prodigy’s vocals into new productions by Havoc and the Alchemist. Big L’s Harlem’s Finest restored and enhanced archive recordings, including a freestyle with JAY-Z that many had only heard in grainy bootlegs, documentaries, or YouTube videos. De La Soul’s Cabin in the Sky used Trugoy’s voice to explore mortality and joy, flowering like a concert of old and new friends.

Each project invited Nas as a featured guest. He appears on songs with Big L, Raekwon, Ghostface, Mobb Deep, and De La Soul. This is not just cross-promotion; it is a way for him to stitch these stories together, to move between boroughs and scenes, to listen as much as he rhymes. Mass Appeal, the company Nas co-owns, supported these projects with infrastructure that older artists rarely receive. Slick Rick noted that Idris Elba created a space where he could step back into his artistry. Havoc of Mobb Deep said he chose to work with Nas because he trusted him like a brother. The project coincided with Nas pledging a million dollars to the Hip-Hop Museum in the Bronx and awarding $500,000 grants to pioneers like Kool G Rap and Grand Puba through the Paid In Full Foundation. An A&R from Big L’s estate said that in a culture where Black artists over 40 are often discarded, Nas insisted on celebrating them. Those acts of philanthropy and curation gave the series a sense of purpose beyond streaming numbers. When critics questioned whether there was a market for these albums, participants responded: This is about honoring a lineage.


So why does it make sense for Nas and Premier to close the curtain? Nasir Jones and Christopher “DJ Premier” Martin met in the early 1990s, when the producer visited Queensbridge after hearing Nas’s demo. Premier produced three songs on Illmatic—“N.Y. State of Mind,” “Memory Lane,” and “Represent”—each capturing the daily rhythms of New York life. According to Premier, Nas wrote his verses in one take, prompting the producer to find a sample that matched the intensity of his lyrics and scratch KRS-One’s vocals into the hook. The result, “N.Y. State of Mind,” became a defining track of the so-called golden era. Premier later produced “Nas Is Like” (1999) and “2nd Childhood” (2001), and he and Nas appeared on the cover of Scratch magazine in 2006, teasing a full collaborative album. The idea lingered. Fans asked about it at shows; Premier promised it would happen; Nas mentioned it on “30” with his 2022 album King’s Disease III. For nearly twenty years, the project was a myth.

In April 2024, the myth became tangible. On the 30th anniversary of Illmatic, Nas and Premier released a single called “Define My Name.” The song revisits the origin of Nas’s name (“Nasir” derives from Arabic and means “helper” or “victorious”) and reflects on what it means to rap at 50. Premier’s boom-bap drums anchor Nas’s verses, and the outro features both artists promising that “the album” is coming. For those who have followed the duo’s partnership, the song is a nod to nostalgia and a promise.

Nas’s recent creative streak helps explain why Light-Years feels different from past speculation. During the pandemic, he and producer Hit-Boy released three King’s Disease albums and three Magic albums, a six-LP run, which is as an “unprecedented 2020s renaissance” for the rapper that’s multiple decades in his arsenal. The run won a Grammy and reintroduced Nas to a generation that may not have grown up with Illmatic. Nas even dedicated a song to encouraging his elder peers to get active with “1-800-Nas-&-Hit.” By the time Light-Years was announced, he had already proven that rappers in their fifties can evolve and experiment rather than resting on laurels. Premier, meanwhile, celebrated hip-hop’s 50th anniversary with an EP and countless DJ sets. The two artists appear energized, not nostalgic.

Importantly, the album is not being sold as a simple return to the 1990s. Nas has said that the series feels like 1995 but is “going forward” and that it carries “that feeling of urgency, that vibration, the celebration of life.” He has also explained that some ideas they recorded during earlier sessions will appear on Light-Years. The album includes recordings that date back to 2006 (allegedly) alongside recent sessions, and Premier has hinted that at least two songs originate from those early meetings. The very act of finishing such a project speaks to the rare ability of Black artists to circle back to unfinished dreams, to be granted the time and resources to deliver on promises delayed by industry politics or personal paths. In a genre that often discards its veterans, receiving the chance to complete an album after twenty years is itself a statement.

Because Light-Years has not yet been released, the column can only imagine its contours. The album title invites reflection on time and distance. A light-year represents the distance light travels in one year—nearly six trillion miles. Observing a distant galaxy means seeing light that left the object long ago; by the time it reaches us, we are looking into its past. Similarly, listening to Light-Years will mean hearing verses and beats that originated years apart. The track you might love most could have been drafted during the mid-2000s or a pandemic session. The album will collapse time, inviting the older and newer Nas fans to perceive 1995, 2006, and 2025 at once. When Nas references a memory, or Premier scratches a vocal, their light will have traveled decades to arrive.

Why does it matter who gets to frame the past, you may ask? Part of the answer lies in the way hip-hop history has often been written by outsiders or shaped by nostalgia that reduces the 1990s to a handful of canonical albums. Nas and Premier, like many of their peers, have watched their work become museum pieces even as they continue to record. In 2006, when Nas provocatively declared that “hip-hop is dead,” he received backlash from younger artists who felt he was dismissing their contributions. Since then, he has shifted from pronouncements to stewardship. By co-founding Mass Appeal Records and curating Legend Has It…, he has used his resources to make space for elders, to ensure that names like Slick Rick, De La Soul, and Big L remain in circulation. He has also channeled significant funds into institutions that will preserve hip-hop’s legacy. In other words, he is not only telling his own story but facilitating others’ stories.

The series also demonstrates that canon-building can come from within the culture rather than from corporate or academic institutions. Nas, Premier, and their peers chose to frame their contributions as heroic narratives by collaborating with Marvel Comics. At New York Comic Con 2025, the team unveiled a limited-edition comic in which Nas, Slick Rick, Big L, Ghostface Killah, Raekwon, Posdnuos, and Havoc become superheroes. Nas explained that artists are like superheroes because they help people get through tough times and “lift people up.” He and Mass Appeal partnered with Marvel not to chase cross-brand marketing but to tell their own stories in a medium long associated with mythology. The comic, like the albums, extends the narrative beyond music and reinforces the idea that these legends have powers worth celebrating.


Within the culture, the value lies not in chart positions but in the act of documentation. An A&R from Big L’s estate said that Nas’s dedication “matters” because it pushes against a culture that discards artists over 40. Havoc discussed making Infinite as a 21-gun salute to his partner. De La Soul used Cabin in the Sky to dance through tears and honor a brother. These acts resist the industry’s demand for constant novelty by insisting that what already exists still has value. They also remind younger artists that there is dignity in aging within rap, that your voice does not need to go silent after a certain age.

Nas and Premier have always reflected a particular New York rhythm. Premier’s beats are built from jazz loops, scratched hooks, and crisp drums; Nas’s writing anchors abstract reflections in concrete details. On “N.Y. State of Mind,” Nas described corners where fiends lean, and Sly and the Family Stone blares out of speakers. Premier recalls that he wanted the beat to match the intensity of Nas’s lines and that the track came together spontaneously. Their collaborations like “Nas Is Like” and “2nd Childhood” similarly capture the city’s mix of nostalgia and realism. Even when Nas raps about distant lands, his cadence feels tethered to stoops and street corners. Premier, a Houston native who made New York his home, understands how to translate those scenes into sound. Light-Years will likely continue this approach. The cover art released in November shows the two men in black leather with rope chains and Rolex watches, their jewelry catching the light. It’s a knowing image: part Dapper Dan styling, part sci-fi aura. They look like men who have traveled across time yet remain rooted in the city that shaped them.


That city has changed. In 2025, New York hip-hop extends from the experimental flows of Fivio Foreign and Ice Spice to the introspective poetics of MIKE and Wiki. The clubs where Nas once performed are now luxury condos or tourist attractions. The sound of New York is no longer defined by one neighborhood or crew but by constant flux. Younger artists borrow from drill, trap, Jersey club, and West African rhythms. They use TikTok to break songs and collaborate with producers worldwide. For them, the golden era is either a childhood soundtrack or a myth. Legend Has It… arrives in this context not to freeze the past but to remind new generations that there are foundations beneath their innovations. When Nas raps alongside Fivio Foreign on “Spicy” or when he invites DJ Premier to scratch on Hit-Boy-produced tracks, he enacts a conversation across generations. Light-Years will likely continue that conversation by integrating contemporary references with the boom-bap vocabulary that shaped them.

Once Light-Years arrives and the Legend Has It series concludes, what happens next? One possibility is that this mode of storytelling becomes a blueprint for other cities. The Bay Area could imagine a similar series with Too $hort, E-40, Souls of Mischief, and The Coup; Los Angeles could center on DJ Quik, Freestyle Fellowship, and others (it’s wishful thinking). Another possibility is that younger New York artists, having watched the elders claim their narratives, will feel empowered to frame their own eras before someone else does. Already, rappers like Joey Bada$$ and A$AP Rocky have referenced their city’s history while forging new sounds. The presence of Light-Years may encourage them to look at the long arc of their careers and think about what they want to say at 40 or 50.

For hip-hop fans (unless you’re one of those who like to pigeonhole Nas into making another Illmatic again), the album offers a chance to consider how we relate to the music that raised us. Nas and Premier are not asking us to live in the past; they are inviting us to see how past and present coexist. When Nas says that 2025 feels like 1995 but is moving forward, he is describing a feeling many of us share when we revisit old albums with new ears. The noise of the New York streets, the smell of vinyl and incense, the crackle of a needle on a record—these sensations are still with us, even as we stream music through apps and attend album premieres via livestream. The legend is not an object locked in a museum but a story we can retell and reshape. Light-Years will not be the final chapter of New York rap, but it will stand as a statement that the people who built the era deserve to speak first when its meaning is debated.

The anticipation around Light‑Years is not just about hearing Nas rap over DJ Premier’s production again. However, that in itself is exciting, but nerve-wracking at the same time, considering the latter’s soundscape outside of producing three songs on De La Soul’s Cabin in the Sky. It’s about witnessing two architects of hip‑hop close a narrative they helped start. The 2025 Legend Has It series has shown what happens when you give elders the stage: you get albums that grapple with grief, rebirth and legacy; you get a philanthropic commitment to preserving culture; you get a universe where comic books, films and music intersect; you get a space where a song recorded in 2006 can finally see daylight next to a verse written last summer. When the album drops in four days, we will hear decades of light converge. Until then, the image of Nas and Premier standing with chains and watches glistening is enough to remind us that the era they built still matters and that they, not outside narrators, will tell you why.

Nas + DJ Premier – Light-Years
Two legends of the game...



    Reviews

12 · 12 · 2025

Legends don’t come much bigger than Nas and DJ Premier. The Queensbridge rapper constructed arguably the definitive East Coast rap masterpiece with ‘Illmatic’, while his recent run with Hit-Boy has rolled back the years to document one of North America’s most potent pens. For his part, DJ Premier helped to codify hip-hop production during the Golden Age, and his work on the final Gangstarr record overhauled their sound for a new era.

Almost 25 years in the making, the much-mythologised ‘Light-Years’ is finally here, and it’s a magnificent listen. From first to last Nas is on supreme form, reinforcing his reputation as one of the best to ever do it. The sheer consistency is remarkable – barely a second goes past without a moment of poetics, the muscularity of his voice displaying maturity, but also a deep-rooted passion for the project.

‘My Life Is Real’ opens with those infectious piano chords, expertly laid out by Preem; Nas brags about the “legend has it kartel”, referencing the broader Mass Appeal slate this release is the foundation stone of. ‘GiT Ready’ is sheer New York hip-hop, the lyrics finding Nas gazing down on his city while DJ Premier spins a vintage Wilon Pickett sample.

—

—

‘NY State Of Mind Pt 3’ places the album within Nas’ broader lineage, but the record truly finds its feel across a confident, fluid mid-section. The dark beats within ‘Madman’ are fantastic, bringing out new timbres in Nas’ voice; ‘Writers’ moves between zero gravity ambience and a rugged, ultra-funky bass line; the fantastic ‘It’s Time’ utilises a wicked Steve Miller sample, pivoting between hip-hop’s past, and its present.

Closing with an emphatic run, Nas’ pen has rarely been so sharp. ‘My Story Your Story’ is playful and inviting, ‘Junkie’ is an eerie warning about addiction, and ‘Shine Together’ is a display of unity. A record that is deeply conscious of its own mythology, ‘Light-Years’ closes with ‘3rd Childhood’, another callback to Nas’ catalogue.

It’s been fascinating watching the social media reaction to ‘Light-Years’ in real-time. In places, there’s a pushback – were expectations too high? Can any record match up to a 20 year wait? Perhaps not, but when the dust settles fans will have one of Nas’ best rap performances, fuelled by one of the all-time great producers.

8/10

Album Review: Light-Years by Nas & DJ Premier
Nineteen years after the Scratch magazine cover, the architect and the boom-bap god finally deliver fifteen tracks of Queens concrete and sample-flip grief.
Dec 12, 2025



“Already classic before you heard it/The spoiler was all my feature verses,” Nas announces early on “My Life Is Real,” and he’s right about the spoiler, if not the modesty. Everything Premier has built for him over three decades—the drums that feel carved from concrete and iron filings, the sample flips that locate grief inside soul records—has served as prelude to a record nobody was sure would actually exist. The project first got floated on the cover of Scratch magazine in January 2006. It resurfaced in 2011 as rumor. In 2022, Nas winked about it on “30.” Then came “Define My Name” in April 2024 for Illmatic‘s thirtieth anniversary. Now, closing out Mass Appeal’s Legend Has It... series alongside Ghostface, Raekwon, Mobb Deep, De La Soul, Big L, and Slick Rick, Light-Years arrives not as an artifact but as an interrogation: what happens when a rapper who openly measures his career in decades builds a record about the pressure of time itself?

The answer is a project that refuses nostalgia while being completely consumed by the question of what stays and what vanishes. Nas doesn’t chase the ‘90s, despite others wanting him and Preem to chase the sound of Livin’ Proof or Moment of Truth. He doesn’t need to. But he does ask, over and over, what it means to still carry the bridge when half the men who walked it with you are dead or gone. The album’s opening track invokes the departed—“Rest in peace, Polo, he see us” and “Big up Big L, Prodigy, Trugoy, they live/Martyrs, if you will”—then locates the living in a present-tense scramble of achievement and damage: “PTSD, project trauma still dwells/Happiness gotta be in you, money can’t help.” This is the tension that runs through all fifteen songs. Nas is rich, secured, globally celebrated, and also still walking through rooms where the walls remember what he came from.

Premier’s production strategy is unusually restrained for a record this long. He doesn’t flood the tracks with dense samples. Instead, he gives Nas space—but a variety of sounds with long pockets of air between the snares where every rhyme has to carry weight. On “N.Y. State of Mind Pt. 3,” he loops Billy Joel’s original “New York State of Mind” as a chassis device, then lets Nas load the verses with contemporary inventory: “Steel toe construct’ walk, Nike shorts at night it caught/Stress’ll cut your life short.” The Billy Joel chop operates as a counterpoint rather than a celebration. Where the piano man romanticized the city as return, Nas treats it as an endurance test, rattling off Rikers, MDC, Michelin-star restaurants, and chopped cheese in the same breath, insisting the streets are “cooking that beef stew” regardless of what condos developers keep stacking on former devil’s playgrounds.

The city as moral infrastructure shows up everywhere. “GiT Ready” places him “corner of 10th street” with VVS arm freezes and VSOP trees, but also in crypto boardrooms and Cabo silk, flipping “Ether to Ethereum” like the wordplay is proof of concept for a life lived between hustles. When Nas talks money on this record—and he talks money constantly—he doesn’t pretend it resolves anything. “From quantum computing to biotech ‘cause it’s life improvin’/Degradable plastic trash removin’/And when the market is down, it’s like a hustle when no coke is around.” The comparison is deliberate. He positions portfolio diversification as street logic repackaged, palms itching the same way they did when opportunity meant a different kind of risk. It’s self-mythologizing, sure, but it’s honest about what kind of self gets mythologized who learned patience and violence in the same hallway.

Where the record gains real texture is in the songs about authorship and permanence—craft memory made material. “Pause Tapes” traces the origin of his production instincts to his mother’s hall closet, digging through Johnny Taylor records and Grover Washington LPs, dropping the needle and pressing record-pause-restart to loop four bars on a ninety-minute tape until something resembling a beat emerged. “Record, loop, repeat/Do that ‘bout twenty times, yo, I made my first beat.” The detail is specific enough to trust. He mentions the Ron G cassette in the deck, the spray of something to hide the aroma, the fiend-needle memory of childhood where kids played with dope paraphernalia the way suburbs played with marbles. Nas isn’t explaining his credentials. He’s locating the moment when making became survival, when the loop became the way out.

“Writers” extends that impulse into cataloguing everyone who put their name on the city before the city erased them. The track opens personal—“Writin’ my name in graffiti/Yes indeedy, I wrote graffiti/I’m hard to read like graffiti”—then expands into a densely packed roll call of bombers and taggers, from Taki 183 to Lady Pink to Cost and Revs. What could scan as trivia parade becomes something else when you hear what Nas is actually saying about documentation: “So let’s salute the highly gifted Krylon mystics/This is homage to the ghetto hieroglyphics.” The graffiti writers and the rappers share an impulse. They mark surfaces that will be buffed or demolished. They insist on presence against erasure. The mic, he says, is a marker, and he’s tagging up names—not just citing them but committing them to the record before they disappear entirely. Henry Chalfant’s Style Wars gets a shoutout because it did the same thing with film.

AZ appears on “My Story Your Story,” and the chemistry is still there, still easy, the two of them trading street memoir and grown-man exhaustion like they’re back on the “Life’s a Bitch” session, despite the slow bounce of the production. “Fuck a orgy, touch her face, two mouths kissin’ on me/Fuck off me, can’t fuck ‘em all, that’s too costly.” The language slides between hedonism and discipline, pleasure acknowledged then bracketed. AZ’s voice remains the perfect foil—smoother, less jagged, balancing Nas’s density with glide. When the track breaks into an interlude, the two of them talk over the beat: “This feel like Delancey Street, this feel like Albee Square Mall... This is 2030 right now.”

“Bouquet (To the Ladies)” risks collapsing into list-poem territory—Nas namechecks everyone from Sha-Rock to Sexyy Red, from Queen Latifah to Ice Spice—but what keeps it grounded is the structural argument underneath the tribute. “What would the world be without beautiful, powerful women?/The Meemaws, the grandmas, the nation buildin’.” He thanks Faith Newman, the A&R who signed him to Columbia in 1991 and co-executive produced Illmatic, because she “created a movement.” It’s not empty applause. It’s an attempt to credit the labor that made his career possible—something the genre has historically undervalued.

The record’s most revealing self-portrait might be “Junkie,” which casts Nas’s relationship to hip-hop as addiction. “Bruh, I’m supposed to big kick this habit/Done with it, had my fun with it/Hard to let it go, how could you when you in love with it?” He describes needing the music every morning, playing it loud while ironing his outfit, zoning out in his car. He can’t function on Suboxone—the substitutes don’t work. He describes sitting in a circle at treatment: “Hi, I’m a rapaholic, only been sober since my last installment/Need music with substance, so it’s abuse they call it.” The metaphor could be cute, but he pushes past cuteness into genuine confession. The dependence isn’t only on making music. It’s on a specific kind of music—gritty, raw, intense, the kind that “keeps calling me” and stays in his arteries. Premier responds with drums that pulse like circulatory pressure.

A prequel to “Daughters,” “Sons (Young Kings)” tries to distill what fatherhood has taught him, and here the writing gets more vulnerable than Nas usually allows. “One day the words may come out the mouth of a reverend/By the power vested in me,’ loud at his wedding/Give flowers while you can smell them, I try to tell him.” The address to young Black boys expands from his own son to a generational plea: stand tall, know you’re glorious, don’t let the world shrink you. It’s direct without being corny, which is harder than it sounds. And then he pivots to autobiography—remembering the crossing sign he used to look at as a child, a silhouette of a grown-up holding a smaller figure’s arm. “I saw it as a little boy who was the baddest, like don’t let ‘em run in traffic.” He thought the sign was specifically about him and his mom. He was wrong, but the wrongness is the point. That’s how childhood works. You assume you’re the center because the alternative is terror.

Picking up the pieces from Stillmatic, “3rd Childhood” closes the record with an argument about aging in a form that treats age as disqualification. “Is it time to take off the scully, the Timbs, and the fitted caps?/Time to let go of the weed, can’t let the jeans sag?/Ozzy Osbourne still got his fingernails black/Rock ‘n rollers is still rebels, any age that they at/But with rap, it’s a time limit? Never.” He names Rastas still smoking in seclusion, pimps still wearing derbies, old men rocking their hats ace-deuce. Continuity isn’t embarrassment. It’s fidelity to origin. He returns to Queensbridge—“Resurrect through the birth of my seed”—and claims the bridge as permanent address. “Hope we get dessert, that’s the cherry on top/Peaceful Sundays, but we still carry the Glocks registered.” Even the guns are legal now, which might be the most middle-aged line on the whole project.

The production never oversells its own importance. Premier scratches and cuts with the fluency of someone who invented the grammar, but he doesn’t showboat after years of onslaught of criticism. The beats serve the writing. The drums hit hard without overwhelming the voice. He leaves room for Nas to stack clauses and shift registers, moving from street reportage to tech-mogul flexing to father’s-blessing softness, sometimes within a single verse. That flexibility is the album’s primary achievement. Nas can be arrogant, tender, paranoid, grateful, and profane across the same sixteen bars, and Premier’s production accommodates all of it without flattening the contradictions, but do not expect the rehash of what you’re expecting.

The record isn’t perfect. Some of the mogul bars land with less force the second or third time—the crypto talk, the Maybach descriptions, the multiple variations on “I’m still the illest.” But even the repetition serves a function. Nas is reassuring himself as much as the listener. He’s saying these things because he needs to keep saying them, because stopping would mean conceding ground. As mentioned about Preem’s production, there are a select few that would’ve benefited from sonics and drums, but at least they hit better than “Prayer Hands.”

“Nasty Esco Nasir” stages an internal argument between three selves—the street persona who robs you, the CEO who whispers in your ear about not caring, and the man who signs his birth certificate Nasir. “My name is not as common as Muhammad or as popular/Or as praiseworthy, so I adopted a moniker/I’m Nasty Nas, I was destined to be here/In Grandmaster Caz’s atmosphere, to breathe/Kool Moe Dee’s air.” The genealogy is explicit. He positions himself as an inheritor and continuer.

    “Phase four, the fourth dimension
    The legacy’s here, and other things I won’t mention
    I’m winning when I’m not even trending
    Trailblazing, the message I’m sending.” — Nas on “Nasty Esco Nasir”

Light-Years doesn’t pretend the wait was worth it in some cosmic sense. The album simply exists, finally, twenty years late and completely aware of its own belatedness. Nas is 52. Premier is 58. They made a record that sounds like they meant it, and they didn’t soften the edges or chase relevance. Whether that’s triumph or stubbornness probably depends on what you came for. “I’m my great-great-grandfather’s dream,” Nas says on “Junkie.” “One thing when you make yourself too accessible/Some could lose respect and think less of you.” He’s talking about the music industry, but he’s also talking about survival. You don’t get to fifty-two in this game without understanding when to withhold.

Great (★★★★☆)

Favorite Track(s): “Pause Tapes,” “Writers,” “Junkie”

nice remix!

How much does he get from 1 song? Or an album sold with 'his' song on it?

Shit, Hittman verses on 2001 kill any of Games raps.

That song 'Dont Trip', Game tried so hard to out-shine Cube and Dre, that he spat two try hard verses last and first...the OGs should of slapped him for fuckin up the song like that.