Nas

Nas: Ten Songs From a Queensbridge Window

*Illmatic* was released on 19 April 1994 and has since been inducted into the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry. Nasir bin Olu Dara Jones was twenty years old, a school dropout since the eighth grade, and had assembled for it the best producers in New York: DJ Premier, Pete Rock, Q-Tip, Large Professor, L.E.S. He has spent three decades being measured against a record he made before he could legally drink.

Queensbridge, and an Eighth-Grade Exit

He was born on 14 September 1973 in Brooklyn to Olu Dara — born Charles Jones III, a jazz and blues musician from Mississippi who took his stage name from the Yoruba — and Fannie Ann Little, a postal worker from North Carolina. The family moved to the Queensbridge Houses in Long Island City, where a neighbour, Willie "Ill Will" Graham, played him records and set the direction.

His parents divorced in 1985 and he left school after eighth grade. What replaced formal education is unusually well documented: he taught himself about African culture through the Five-Percent Nation and the Nuwaubian Nation, played trumpet, and wrote rhymes. He called himself Kid Wave, then Nasty Nas. At sixteen he met the producer Large Professor and began cutting demos; in 1991 he debuted on Main Source's "Live at the Barbeque"; in 1992 he signed to Columbia.

Illmatic

It is short, dense and almost entirely without concession, and it is by broad agreement one of the greatest albums hip-hop has produced. Peter Shapiro credited it with a "devastating match between lyrics and production" and a "potent evocation of life on the street." Robert Christgau's judgement is more sweeping: "Nas has been transfiguring gangsta rap since *Illmatic*." It was not, however, a commercial monster — and what he did next set up the central tension of his career.

The Commercial Turn

*It Was Written* (July 1996) debuted at number one, powered by "If I Ruled the World (Imagine That)" with Lauryn Hill: a pop move from an artist canonised for refusing pop moves. Then came *The Firm* (1997) with AZ, Foxy Brown and Nature, and in 1999 both *I Am...* and *Nastradamus*, released in the same year and criticised as inconsistent and overly commercial. By the turn of the century the argument about Nas was whether he had squandered the best debut in the genre.

Ether

Jay-Z made that argument publicly. The two had been friendly in the 1990s; in 2001 Jay-Z performed "Takeover" at Summer Jam. Nas answered on *Stillmatic* with "Ether," a song whose title has since entered the language as a verb. Hot 97 polled listeners on which was the better diss record; Nas won with 58 per cent to 42. Jay-Z replied with "Supa Ugly," which made explicit references to Nas's girlfriend Carmen Bryan. They ended it in October 2005 at Jay-Z's "I Declare War" concert, performing "Dead Presidents" together, and in 2006 Nas signed to Def Jam — with Jay-Z as its president.

Consolidation, Trouble, and a Second Portfolio

*God's Son* (2002), made in the year his mother died of cancer, was named the year's best hip-hop album by Time. *Hip Hop Is Dead* (2006) debuted at number one. *Distant Relatives* (2010) with Damian Marley donated its royalties to African charities. Then, teamed with the producer Hit-Boy, *King's Disease* (2020) won Best Rap Album at the 63rd Grammys — his first Grammy, after seventeen nominations and twenty-seven years. The partnership kept going through *King's Disease II* and *III*, three *Magic* albums, and *Light-Years* with DJ Premier in December 2025.

The record is not clean. The IRS filed a lien for over $2.5 million in 2009, past $6.4 million by 2011. In 2012 he took $300,000 for a concert in Luanda and did not appear; the promoter and his son were held at gunpoint before US embassy intervention, and Nas returned the fee. He sampled the Nigerian twins the Lijadu Sisters in 2006 without clearance or credit. In 2018 his former wife Kelis accused him of physical and mental abuse; he denied it and counter-accused her. Alongside all this ran a genuinely successful second career: Mass Appeal Records, and QueensBridge Venture Partners, which backed Dropbox, Lyft and Robinhood and returned him $40 million when Amazon acquired Ring and PillPack.

Why Nas Is Called a Genius

The claim is craft, specific and technical, and unusually well attested by people who study the form. Adam Bradley, in *Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop*, calls him "perhaps contemporary rap's greatest innovator in storytelling," pointing to songs narrated before the narrator's birth and after his death, to biographies, allegories and epistolary songs — a range of narrative perspective with no obvious rival in the genre. Kool Moe Dee identified a structural innovation: "Before Nas, every MC focused on rhyming with a cadence that ultimately put the words that rhymed on beat with the snare drum. Nas created a style of rapping that was more conversational than ever before." That off-beat conversational flow is now standard equipment. The Source ranked him second on its Top 50 Lyricists in 2012, and in 2013 Harvard established the Nasir Jones Hip-Hop Fellowship.

The counter-case is the one his critics have made since 1996. He has one Grammy from seventeen nominations, and it arrived twenty-seven years after his debut. Two albums released in a single year, 1999, were judged compromised. The gap between the reputation and the discography is the defining fact about him: the storytelling faculty is real and unmatched, but he has deployed it unevenly across three decades, and a self-taught craftsman who peaked at twenty is a different proposition from a mind that kept building.

Legacy

About.com named him the greatest MC of all time in 2014; Billboard put him on its ten best rappers list in 2015; in March 2012 he became the first rapper with a verified account on Genius — a lyrics-annotation platform whose entire premise is that rap rewards close reading. That premise is, more than anyone else's, his.