Nas - Nas Is Like

"A baby's being born the same time a man is murdered the beginning and end."

Album: I Am... [3rd album]
Recorded: New York
Genre: Hip Hop, East Coast Hip Hop
Album Release: April 6th 1999
Single Release: March 2nd 1999 [lead single]
Length: 3:57
Producer: DJ Premier
Vocalist: Nas [age 25]
Label: Columbia

Music Video


Live in 2012

Charts, Streams & Sales

Spotify: Over 120 million
YouTube Music: Over 130 million

Credits

Details

• On the cover of Nas' third LP, I Am, he portrayed himself as the famed Egyptian pharoah Tutankhamun. Only, in his hubris, he fell victim to the curse of the forbidden tomb when he almost suffocated while making a clay mould of his face for the album cover. There weren't enough air holes in the mask!
  
  
• Bootleggers released an early version of I Am... on .mp3 and Nas had to redo the record at the last minute. It shows. Many of the finished tracks were shelved only to be released years later as a part of the fantastic The Lost Tapes.
  
  It's a shame we never got to see the intended version of I Am.... If you combine the best tracks, such as 'Nas Is Like', 'NY State of Mind Part 2' and 'Hate Me Now', with some of the better songs on The Lost Tapes, like 'Purple' and 'Doo Rags,' he could have crafted an album of similar quality to his debut.
  
  
• On 'Nas Is Like' the rapper wastes no time in telling the listener how good he is on the mic while also displaying the necessary rhythmical expertise to make his claims credible. Nas begins with religious iconography that continues into his second verse, sayings 'before the christ, after the death', referring to the the entirety of time, both B.C. and A.D., as if he's a metaphysical figure that strides both epochs.
  
  Inbetween the religious grandiosities, he raps about street life and how he turned himself from a poor man into a rich man, "I'm a poor man's dream" and celebrates the money earned through his hard work in the rap game. The absoulte banger of a beat, produced by DJ Premier, compliments the lyricism and bounces from the first second to the last. 'Nas Is Like' is a classic nineties hip hop track that showcases two of the best who ever did it on the top of their game.
  
  
• When Nas isn't comparing himself to Jesus, he's comparing himself to Pharoah, The cover for his album I Am... features him replete with ancient Egyptian headdress. In the same way as Canibus uses scientific references in his rhymes to give his sentences a unique flavour, Nas uses the historical. On 'Rule', which was the first single from  Stillmatic, he says "ancient kings from Egypt upto Julius Caesar" and in 'I Can', from 2002, he says

  "There was empires in Africa called Kush, Timbuktu, where every race came to get books to learn from black teachers, who taught Greeks and Romans, Asian, Arabs and gave them gold"

  On the same song he also claims that a disgruntled Alexander the Great shot the nose off the sphinx as a way of destroying black history, which is completely untrue. Gunpowder didn't exist at the time of Alexander the Great and it was Napoleon who is blamed for the shooting despite all evidence showing the nose was chiselled off centuries before his birth. But to check the accuracy of his historical claims is to miss the point.
  
  Nas is looking at the past of black people as a way to inspire pride in his present black audience, to take the onus away from slavery and put it on the heroic, mythical figures of old. All cultures have heroes whose glorification elevates them to a point beyond that of mere mortals, whether it be Alfred the Great, Joan of Arc, Nefertiti or Gilgamesh. History is itself a story told and retold until it becomes mistaken for truth. What is the harm in embellishment for artistic purposes if it inspires positive change in the present?
  
  When I first listened to Nas' music his statements often came across the wisdom of older generations. Almost as if he had secret knowledge was taking time to share it with me. Now I know better, but there is still truth in the music.
  
  At his best, Nas tells young women they should watch out for older men who want to use them. He tells them to use protection, and they don't need peroxide and make-up to be beautiful. He shows awareness of the social issues that especially affect poor, inner city areas and expresses them with both intelligence and poetry.
  
  

Artwork