I downloaded this album for free from okayplayer.com but might have paid for it if given the option. Especially being someone who does not own a whole lot of Nas.
This album is a collaboration between Nas and The Roots with a few other guests. They each do some of their own work, and a few songs recorded live together.
The album does a few things.It puts Nas up against Black Thought and much as I love The Roots, I found myself coming down quite easily on Nas' side. It left me fascinated with Nas, and led me to look up each track to see what album it came off of, if any. Nas is a master story teller. I listened to the whole album on a run and usually my mind wanders as I run but Nas' lyrics would snap me back to attention when he came on. I love Black Thought and think he has a great flow and is thoughtful, but next to Nas his content is all over the place. He can move from bragging about his skill to relationship issues all in one verse, while Nas is really giving us an episode of either his life or someone else's. Nas' lyrics are like amazing short stories that don't make it to the pages of New Yorker but could hang with the best of their memoir, political commentary, or fiction. Black Thought's rhymes are like the poems, beautiful and thought provoking, but not always a story that takes me with it.
There are two live tracks with The Roots playing Nas' beats and rhyming, and make me ACHE wishing I had been at that concert !!! Nas is like!!!! There is something very special that makes my blood pump faster when you have real instruments playing the hard hitting Nas beats.
The Roots tracks were remixed and (at least the tracks I was already familiar with) had a different flavor and feel.Some worked for me, some I loved and some I'm still not sure of. The remix of "You Got Me" has the hook in Spanish, features a new singer and a translation that gives the independent and free feeling of the original a needy tinge that I resent for some reason. Maybe because I so adore hearing both Jill and Erykah singing it.
I listened all the way through the album once and on the second time realized that Nas' first track is "No Idea's Original". "no idea's original, there's nothing new under the sun, it's never what you do but how it's done. " That really ties the album together for me. No original tracks but it's done new, and satisfying. That being said, before I could even finish putting my ideas together and on paper about this album, I bought the next and my attention had shifted. So it's not original, but it is creative and satisfying, but not intensely so. Its making a dish you know how to make with your eyes closed and then tossing in a different ingredient to see how it comes out. But just one new ingredient, and one that we already know we like the flavor of. It's comforting because its what we know, done a little differently, and it works. On to Esperanza! Or Jose James.
