Some critics might argue that 2012’s Life Is Good is an exception to this rule. This indifference to the normal aging process feels appropriate for someone who’s looked 25 since Pac was alive. But at his best, Nas has always collapsed age and time in a fugue of shocking detail. This is not to mischaracterize his early work as flatly philosophical - from the beginning, he kept razors under his tongue and Uzis in his winter coats - or to overstate the success of his late-period albums, which can feel obligatory, xeroxes of xeroxes spit out at three-quarter speed. When he was barely out of his teens, he was rapping with a convincing weariness about the things he’d seen, lived, weathered now, closing in on 50, his music is dotted with vignettes from Koch-era New York so vivid they might as well be in the present tense. Taken as a whole, Nas’s catalog plays something like a Möbius strip.
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