If you are a true fan of the art of rap, go buy Nas’ The Lost Tapes now.
If you are merely enamored with the flashy samples and stale lyrics that are dominating rap right now, however, you probably will not like this album.
The fact of the matter is that The Lost Tapes is the best rap album to come out this year, and will probably be the best rap album to come out for quite a long time.
Nas’ work harkens back to when rap was an underground industry, before MTV, the media and white kids like me obnoxiously mainstreamed it. In an era when most artists rap about snorting coke, shooting people, fornicating with hookers and drinking champagne, Nas (who himself fell prey to those aforementioned pitfalls in his most recent LPs like “Stillmatic”) gives rap back to the streets, where it came from. He raps about the meaning of life, the exploitation of black people, racial tensions and class conflict, in addition to a host of other different issues.
The Lost Tapes is jam-packed with songs that actually challenge their listeners with real problems, such as “Black Zombie,” which urges African-Americans to rise up against the system under which they are oppressed with lyrics like these:
“What do we own? Not enough land, not enough homes Not enough banks, to give a brother a loan What do we own? The skin on our backs, we run and we ask for reparations, then they hit us with tax And insurance if we live to be old, what about now? So stop being controlled, we black zombies.”
Nas also uses the Tapes to illustrate more universal issues, like marital infidelity in “Poppa Was a Playa.” This is refreshing in a time when most rap albums completely avoid any real issues at all, and merely create a spectacle, a façade that helps to reinforce the very system that mainstream rappers pretend to rebel against.
At the end of the day, Nas is the best rapper alive. His talents simply cannot be matched by any other person in the industry right now. Despite efforts by rap producers to fashion finely polished, high production value records, it is a simple fact that talent cannot be manufactured in a studio.
With The Lost Tapes, Nas finally relies on his real strength, his ability as a rapper. Though this album will probably not be a great commercial success, The Lost Tapes will go down as one of the most important releases in the genre when the history of rap is written.
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