Trivia / Nas

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• Acclaimed Flop: Despite often being cited as the greatest Hip-Hop album of all time, Illmatic sold rather poorly, debuting at #12 on Billboard's Top 200, taking two years to reach even gold status, seven years to reach platinum, and twenty-five years to reach multi-platinum. This commercial failure is why Nas went with a more mainstream sound for It Was Written, which debuted at #1 and went to sell over two million.
• Creator Breakdown: Nas was creatively running on fumes for Nastradamus due to his mother's worsening illness, and it shows.
• Development Hell: The leaked tracks from I Am and the project that eventually became The Lost Tapes went through a tumultuous 4-year period of Nas and his record label figuring out how they should release them.
  • The decision to release Nastradamus as a separate album was apparently made pretty early on, because it was advertised in the CD booklet for I Am as releasing later that year. However, it's not clear exactly when the decision was made for it to mostly feature new material rather than for it to feature the scrapped tracks from I Am. Only one leaked I Am cut - "Project Windows" - was included on the final album. (Unsurprisingly, it's widely considered the best song on the album.)
  • In early 2001, select hip hop magazines received review copies◊ of a CD called Death of Escobar. This was most likely a transitional project between Nastradamus and what eventually became The Lost Tapes, and showed the intention for the leaked tracks to still see release in some form. An email from Sony PR as well as the title of the album imply the release would have maintained the (probable) original "death and reincarnation" concept of Nastradamus.
  • The final version of The Lost Tapes is actually a combination of leaked I Am tracks with unused songs from Stillmatic. It drops the concept of Nas's reincarnation entirely and has a much looser theme as a result.
  • Though DJ Premier has produced several classic Nas tracks, the two have never done a full album together. Nas has reportedly been interested in this since 2007, but these plans haven’t come to fruition. However, in 2022’s album King’s Disease III, Nas says “Premier album still might happen,” so the possibility is there.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: For people that wanted to see Puffy get crucified, you would've had to get a time machine and go back to the original TRL airing of the "Hate Me Now" video, because the cut containing the offending scene didn't reappear until 2022.
• Production Posse: Nas tends to rotate the crew backing him on his albums, but DJ Premier, Large Professor, L.E.S., Salaam Remi, and Hit-Boy are among his most frequent producers. AZ and Havoc & the late Prodigy from Mobb Deep are his most frequent right-hand rappers, with each of them regularly appearing on each other's albums.
• Uncredited Role: He was an uncredited ghostwriter for several artists, including Will Smith.
  • "Poppa Was a Playa", a leaked I Am track that eventually surfaced on The Lost Tapes, was one of the very first productions by Kanye West. However, due to an oversight, he was not credited on the album - he was working for D-Dot at the time, and D-Dot received sole credit.
• What Could Have Been: He and frequent collaborator AZ have repeatedly discussed a collabo album that has never come to fruition.
  • Much of I Am... was completely rerecorded in one month after several of the planned tracks were leaked to the internet. For those curious, most of the leaked material (notably, "Drunk by Myself" and "Poppa was a Playa") eventually was released on The Lost Tapes to great acclaim, which makes one wonder what I Am... would have originally sounded like.
  • More recently, it appears that Nas was interested in getting Jay-Z and Eminem, both prominent fathers in hip-hop with daughters, on a remix of "Daughters". Eminem reportedly turned it down because he felt as if he had put his daughter's name in his songs enough already, while Jay-Z was busy at the time. Considering how skilled all three of them are, the "Daughters" remix might qualify as the best rap song never made.
  • "Live Nigga Rap" on It Was Written was originally recorded for Mobb Deep's album, Hell on Earth, but Nas loved the song so much he bought it off them to include on his own album. Mobb Deep agreed after deciding being featured on Nas's album would get them more exposure than the other way around. This explains why Nas only actually appears on the song's third verse, with Havoc and Prodigy taking the lead for the rest of it.
  • In 2016 Nas appeared on a DJ Khaled song aptly titled "Nas Album Done", but the album in question has never actually surfaced; Nasir was only made and released 2 years later. Swizz Beatz claimed in 2018 that he recorded and produced a complete album with Nas in 2016 that ended up unreleased, which would line up with this. The Lost Tapes 2 contains a few songs that are very likely from this album, such as the Swizz-produced "Adult Film".
  • Nas was supposed to be featured on the legendary The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, but blew off the recording sessions. He's called this one of the biggest regrets of his career.
  • Nas also blew off Jay-Z early in his career when the latter asked him to appear on Reasonable Doubt, which is probably one of the original seeds for their infamous feud.
  • Nas nearly got a feature from Prince, but the notoriously anti-label Prince turned him down for not owning his masters. Prince liked him, though, and gave him an open invitation for a live performance together.
• Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things: In the late '90s, while Nas was working on his album I Am...The Autobiography, a bunch of the tracks were leaked on the Internet. In response, he rewrote a great deal of the album in just a month. The fanbase generally believes that the finished album suffered because of this.
• Word of Dante: The original tracklist for the 2-disc version of I Am: The Autobiography has never been released. There are many fanmade reconstructions of the album floating around online, but these are basically educated, speculative tracklists piecing together the original 13-track leak from 1998, the final tracklists of I Am and Nastradamus, and various unsorted leaked songs from the same sessions (many of which would have made up a scrapped precursor to The Lost Tapes titled Death of Escobar). Using inferences from the content of various songs and the scant pieces of official information from magazines and press releases as a guide, the most commonly accepted interpretation of the albums' original concept among fans is that disc 1 would have been a story of Nas's life, while disc 2 would have told of his death and reincarnation as Nastradamus. The lynchpins to the theory are tracks like "Fetus", "Poppa was a Playa", "Undying Love", and especially "Amongst Kings", a loosie leaked track which fits the 2001 Sony PR email describing Death of Escobar perfectly.
• Working Title: His untitled 2008 album was originally titled Nigger, but it was left untitled due to the controversy.

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