Nas / YMMV - TV Tropes

Broken Base:
- Nastradamus, to an extent: While widely considered to be his weakest album, fan opinion tends to divided on whether it's a mostly decent album marred by unusually bad singles, or a mostly-terrible album with only a few decent tracks.
  - "You Owe Me", the second single from the album, is probably Nas's most divisive track - it's an unabashed Timbaland club banger, and whether or not you enjoy it depends on if you can look past the sheer concept of street poet Nas doing such a song, and its frankly misogynist lyrics.
- Nas's discography provides an interesting version of this. Illmatic and Nastradamus are respectively near-unanimously considered his best and worst album. Among fans and critics, rankings of his top 5 generally include It Was Written and Stillmatic at least, followed by any of The Lost Tapes (if counted), Life is Good, and King's Disease II. It's actually the middle of Nas's discography where fans have no real consensus on how to rank them or how they compare to each other - the one consistent trend is that God's Son tends to pull ahead of the rest of the pack, which typically consists of I Am and his remaining 2000s albums, and Nasir either middling or at the bottom with Nastradamus. The remainder are all considered decent to above average at worst.
The Catchphrase Catches On: "Ether" has given birth to three of these.
- The word "ether" itself has become a term to describe harshly eviscerating someone.
- Though Nas's use of it was borrowed from Eminem, it was one of the first instances of calling someone a "stan" as a pejorative.
- Nas's statement that Eminem "murdered Jay-Z on his own shit" popularized the concept of "renegading" (named after the song on The Blueprint Eminem featured on), where a guest rapper is perceived as having outperformed the main artist.
Critical Dissonance: Stillmatic received mostly lukewarm reviews from critics but was widely embraced by hip hop fans as a return to form for Nas, due to its return to the more philosophically-minded lyrics of Illmatic and the fantastic diss track "Ether". To this day, it's considered by many to be one of his best albums, if not quite on par with Illmatic.
Even Better Sequel
- After It Was Written ended up Vindicated by History, a couple people who preferred it to Illmatic became more vocal. Notably, rappers like Lupe Fiasco and ScHoolboy Q have called it their favorite album and that it was superior to Illmatic.
- King's Disease was Nas's first album to win a Grammy. He ran a victory lap with King's Disease II, which has become even more acclaimed thanks to its deepened production, lyrics and album cuts, and some dream features from EPMD, Eminem, and Lauryn Hill.
Faux Symbolism:
- Some of the music video for "Hate Me Now" is kinda reminiscent of some Passion Play.
- Nas loves referencing religious imagery and scripture, especially Christian and Islamic, because he read a lot of religious literature when he was younger. He's clarified that although he believes in a higher power of some sort, he doesn't personally belong to any particular religion.
First Installment Wins: Illmatic.
- In a rare double-example of this trope, Nas's first on-record appearance, on the Main Source's "Live at the Barbeque", is considered by some to be one of his best verses.
- AZ's opening verse on "Life's a Bitch" was his first recorded rap verse, and widely considered one of the best of all time, arguably even better than Nas's own on the same song.
Harsher in Hindsight: ''Hip Hop Is Dead''.
- Nas felt this way about "Destroy and Rebuild", as he regretted not fully getting to make amends with Prodigy before he succumbed to his sickle cell disease in 2017. "Queensbridge Politics" on The Lost Tapes 2 was a reflection about this.
- While Nas doesn't regret "Ether", he doesn't perform it live anymore for obvious reasons. The track also had to have some lines removed. Most notably, "It should have been you in the plane crash", mainly referencing Aaliyah's death, but also hitting a little too close to home in the aftermath of 9/11. ^note
It's Popular, Now It Sucks!
- Many hardcore hip hop fans criticized It Was Written and I Am, as well as Nas's other projects such as The Firm for leaning in a more mainstream direction, with more polished production, gangsta lyrics, greater emphasis on high-profile features and R&B hooks. While The Firm and Nastradamus were unsuccessful^note, It Was Written and I Am sold far more than Illmatic.
- Averted by Stillmatic, which was the album that officially restored Nas's street cred despite selling almost as many copies as It Was Written. The pendulum swung back in Nas's favour as he was now seen as the underdog compared to Jay-Z, so a significant amount of the album's success was driven by "Ether".
- Ironically, while Nas is extremely well-known among hip hop fans and artists, as a creator he's managed to avert this. He doesn't have the same crossover celebrity ubiquity as some of his peers like Dr. Dre, Tupac, Snoop Dogg, and Jay-Z, who are all well-known even among pop and casual crowds, which has helped him to maintain a reputation and street cred as a "rapper's rapper". This is probably in part due to his own disinterest in celebrity culture and fame, and is possibly what has helped to rehabilitate the image of It Was Written.
Misaimed Fandom
- Many listeners thought Nas was taking subliminal shots at Tupac Shakur in his song "The Message" with the opening lines ("Fake thug, no love,you get the slug CB 4 Gusto"), including Tupac himself. The truth is Nas was actually taking shots at The Notorious B.I.G. in the whole song and the fake thug he mentioned in the song was just any typical thug in general who would get no love in the streets and receive a bullet for their troubles.
- It's not uncommon to still see fans of Jay-Z and Nas try to continue stirring the rivalry between them, even though their beef has been over far longer than it ever even lasted.
- "Ultra Black" from King's Disease attracted a lot of attention from fans and media due to a line namedropping Doja Cat^note, which they perceived as a diss, but Doja herself said she didn't care and Nas even went on record as saying it wasn't that deep and he was just going for a suitable reference that fit the rhyme.
Overshadowed by Controversy:
- Nas's two releases in 1999 owe themselves to an infamous Content Leak that is nearly impossible to divorce from their reputations. I Am was to be a double album before over a dozen tracks leaked online, resulting in half the tracklist being replaced, and its second disc scrapped and retooled as Nastradamus only 8 months later. This has become arguably the biggest What Could Have Been of Nas's career, with numerous fanmade bootlegs and mixtapes being created to try and reconstruct what the original albums might have looked like.
- The untitled album is probably best known for the controversy around its original title.
- "Hate Me Now" from I Am can't be brought up without mentioning that the video caused Puffy to smash a champagne bottle over Steve Stoute's head.
- Nasir's release was marred by accusations from his ex-wife Kelis that he had physically abused her repeatedly during their marriage.
Sacred Cow: Illmatic is, to this day, a near-universal choice for best hip hop album of all time. Nas himself is a downplayed example, where he's a unanimous presence on "best rapper of all time" lists, but people are often quick to criticize his other albums.
Seasonal Rot: Nastradamus does have its moments, but it's widely regarded as his weakest album.
- With the help of hindsight, Hip Hop Is Dead seems significantly less impactful/meaningful than the three albums that followed it — his untitled album for its approach to race relations, Distant Relatives for its pan-African consciousness, and Life Is Good for its well-grounded examination of his own life as a man who'd made it through the madness of his youth and became a more grounded, balanced person. Compared to these, Hip Hop Is Dead is rife with tired cliches, though it does have good moments as well.
- On another note, one can also say that God's Son, despite the catchiness of some of its tunes, isn't as emotionally or intellectually nuanced as most of his other albums, including Hip Hop Is Dead.
- Nasir is seen as a bit of a missed opportunity and a rushjob: not terrible, but not living up to the legendary status a collaboration between Nas and Kanye West should have. Nas himself has commented that he didn't have nearly as much time to work with Kanye in the studio as he would have liked to, as Kanye was spread extremely thin during his infamous Wyoming sessions.
Signature Song: "N.Y. State of Mind". Also “Ether”, which is considered one of the greatest diss tracks of all time.
- Chart Displacement: Neither song was officially released as a single, although "Ether" saw a lot of airplay as a street single, and was indeed released as such prior to the album. "If I Ruled the World" from It Was Written, "I Can", and "Made You Look" from God's Son are his most commercially successful singles. Downplayed as all three are among his most iconic songs in their own right, especially the first.
So Bad, It's Good: Many consider "Shoot 'Em Up" from Nastradamus to be this, as it's a generic gangsta story rapped entirely to the tune of Christmas carols.
Tainted by the Preview: The mixed response to I Am and Nastradamus was not helped by the fact that the leaked songs were widely considered to be better than many of the tracks actually on both albums.^note
Tough Act to Follow: Nothing he has made after Illmatic has been so acclaimed.
Values Dissonance: Some of the homophobic insults in "Ether" are criticized more often nowadays, although the rest of the song maintains its legendary status. In general, Nas used so many homophobic insults during his beef with Jay-Z that even Jay pointed out it was getting kind of weird.
Vindicated by History: His second album, It Was Written, which was given flak for not being Illmatic 2, has since grown in status over the years. Some went as far as to say that It Was Written is actually better than Illmatic. At the very least, it is a far more common opinion nowadays that the album is worthy of classic status, and it contains fan favorite tracks like "The Message" and "I Gave You Power".
- It's been said that Illmatic is his best album if you're a fan, It Was Written is what you study if you want to be a rapper.
- Nas's decision to title his 2006 album Hip Hop is Dead is thought to have remained prescient in retrospect; while it had its bright spots^note, the 2000s is more widely agreed to have been a weaker era for hip hop than the 90s and 2010s^note.
Win Back the Crowd: Stillmatic was this for fans, after the lukewarm reception of Nas's last two albums. Critics, on the other hand, held the album in less regard.

YMMV / Nas

Edit Locked