Even when he was too young to have one, Nas was fixated on the past. His breakout moment, the starmaking first verse from Main Source’s 1991 posse cut, “Live at the Barbeque,” cast him as the perpetual Old Soul, flaunting his years-long street bona fides from the wizened perch of 17. Nas dropped Illmatic, his unimpeachable opening salvo, when he was only 20, taking a haunted stroll through his Queensbridge adolescence on “Memory Lane (Sittin’ in da Park).” An undercurrent of nostalgia weaves throughout his 30-year discography. You hear it as he wistfully thumbs through pages of forgotten verses on “Book of Rhymes,” from 2002’s God’s Son, or 10 years later in the high-octane recollections of Life Is Good highlight “A Queens Story.” Throughout both the King’s Disease and Magic series, Nas and Hit-Boy’s six-album run from 2020 to 2023, he uses memories as myth-making tools, sitting atop them like a victorious monarch surveying his spoils.
Nas has indeed lived many lives. He’s been a semi-serious graffiti writer, a scrappy young MC with an immediate classic, a mainstream darling trying to live up to that classic, an improbable pop sensation, a cult movie star, an allegedly abusive husband, a venture capitalist, a restaurateur, and a wealth manager’s dream. And throughout it all, he’s continued to rap, maintaining the kind of prolific output that prolonged stardom and its webbing of diversified portfolios rarely afford. One’s mileage may vary with individual records, but he’s high up on a very short list of the best rappers ever, and Illmatic is still widely recognized as the greatest rap album of all time, even recently voted as such by this very publication’s readers.
Many of Nas’ best songs are collaborations with DJ Premier, the equally legendary producer. His work in the ’90s and early ’00s, both as half of Gang Starr and as a free agent, helped define and subsequently update the golden-age East Coast boom-bap sound. Primo left the seams showing on his best beats, deftly combining chunky sample chops and simple, swinging, heavy-bag drums into herky-jerky, screw-face symphonies. His scratched hooks were iconic, and each line he collaged into a chorus became canon. Though Gang Starr was Primo’s primary artistic partnership for nearly two decades, it was easy to imagine that he and Nas could form the same symbiotic chemistry he shared with Guru if they combined forces for a full-length. Imagine an album full of “I Gave You Power” and “Nas Is Like” jams, fans thought. The two appeared together on the January 2006 cover of Scratch Magazine, and wishcasting kicked into high gear. Over the years, they’d make occasional nebulous allusions to a forthcoming duo record that never appeared, and it became one of the reigning what-ifs in hip-hop history.
When Mass Appeal announced that its Legend Has It series would conclude with Light-Years, the long-anticipated Nas and DJ Premier album, rap nerds (read: elder millennials and Gen Xers) reacted with a mixture of apprehension and delight. On the one hand, it’s a Nas and DJ Premier album, the white whale for dudes who used to rock brimmed beanies and argue on the Okayplayer boards. On the other hand, it’s a Nas and DJ Premier album in the mid 2020s, a decade in which neither artist has made anything truly great. Sure, Magic 3 is a legitimately good Nas album, but he and Hit-Boy had to wobble through five previous albums to get there. Primo had a busy 2025, producing a couple of LPs for Roc Marciano and Ransom, but they were ultimately forgettable, filled with sleepy, half-hearted versions of his tried-and-true formula.
