Photo by Matt Salacuse
5-10-15-20 features artists talking about the music that made an impact on them throughout their lives, five years at a time. Listen along to Nas' picks on Spotify.
Nas began his career looking back. Even in his earliest material, you could hear nostalgia for bygone worlds. Last year’s Life Is Good might have been the most valedictory record of his career, opening with a weepy overture of piano and strings surrounded by the sound of cheering crowds-- very much the prelude to a champagne-popping, gold-watch retirement speech. Nas obliged, filling Life Is Good with verses that ran their fingers lovingly over tiny details (“At night, New York, eat a slice too hot/ Use my tongue to tear the skin hanging from the roof of my mouth”) and dialed out to swallow entire borough histories (“A Queens Story”). It was a reminder that Nas’s observational eye is never as keen as when it’s backtracking to earlier times...
Hall & Oates: "Kiss On My List"
I don’t know remember much about five, but when I was eight years old, I loved the sounds of Joe Raposo, the composer who made the theme song for "Sesame Street". I loved Michael Jackson and the Jackson Five, of course, and I loved the Police. One of my favorite songs was “Kiss On My List” [sings]: “Your kiss, your kiss is on my list.” Who made that? Probably Michael McDonald.
Rick James: Cold Blooded
I made my brother buy Cold Blooded for me; both of us could only buy one record each, so I picked a Michael Jackson album and I made him pick Rick James. My favorite from that album was probably "Ebony Eyes" with Smokey Robinson-- people didn't understand how bad he really was.
Big Daddy Kane: Long Live the Kane
Anything by Big Daddy Kane, or Eric B. & Rakim, Public Enemy, LL Cool J, Kool G Rap. I could go word-for-word regarding any of the albums from ‘88. Big Daddy Kane was a teacher to me; he taught me how it’s supposed to be done. I learned a lot about the world from Big Daddy Kane. He had a big vocabulary: I learned a lot of words from rap music.
Dr. Dre: The Chronic
Doggy Style and The Chronic hit me off crazy. They felt like out-of-this-world music. It changed me. It was my day-to-day theme music. '93 was a crazy year. Illmatic was supposed to have wrapped by then, and I was waiting for it to be released. But that album was actually a part of ‘93, because it leaked. It was everywhere: LA, D.C., Atlanta, New York. It wasn't a leak in the sense of today, where its all over the world at once, but people had already talked about it so much, it felt like it was everywhere.
DMX: It's Dark and Hell Is Hot
That was the year DMX took over the world. He was a street-rapper back then, battling. A bad dude. I heard some of the stuff he had put out on mixtapes, and you could hear that he was coming for the throne, coming for everybody’s head. I was working with DMX on Belly right when it was beginning to happen and we became brothers on the set of that movie-- so I was lucky not to be in his path like that.
A lot of people will see X now and say shit about him, but they don’t understand where he’s coming from when he’s talking about the rappers out today. That’s always been DMX. Before people knew who he was, he always spoke his mind, he’s always been 100% street and never cared what nobody thought about him. His talent speaks for itself.
That was also the year that Lauryn dropped Miseducation. There was a guy who worked on Belly with me and DMX who'd heard the record, and everyday he would try to tell me how incredible this music that was about to come out was. I tried to get a description, like, “What do you mean?” And he just couldn’t say anything. He just kept saying, “It moves your soul.” He did not lie.
Nas: God's Son
When I made God’s Son, and the song “Made You Look” in particular, I felt that there was a lot of bullshit going on in rap. Without sounding cocky, I wanted “Made You Look” to bring “real hip-hop” back to the forefront. People get killed for saying that phrase, “real hip-hop,” because everyone uses it too much. A lot of people don’t know what “real hip-hop” is. I’m not going to try to explain that; I’ll just leave it open. I feel like rap needed a smack in the face. There wasn’t enough of that raw sound in 2003, absolutely not. When the beat cuts out and I’m rhyming at the end, I wanted to sound like the EPMD record where they had K Solo and Redman on it ["The Head Banger"]. My intentions were to blow everything else out.
Public Enemy
I remember things being kinda cool, rap-wise. Maybe too cool. Everything felt safe and calm in my life. But I felt an underlying hypocrisy one going on, a disconnect between older people and young people, particularly when it came to hip-hop culture. I was coming off of Hip Hop Is Dead, and the Nigger Tape or the Untitled Album was my political version of Hip Hop Is Dead, the political side of that conversation. I started to remember what Public Enemy stood for, what Ice Cube stood for-- I was trying to be like N.W.A. and Public Enemy in one person. It was my salute to them.
