Nas and a "Beautiful Life"

“These rappers talkin' real shit I lived”

I’ve been sitting with Nas’ Lost Tapes 2 for a week now. I listened a few times and I’m pleased. Nas always gives me something to think about lyrically, and when his beat selection is this good, it’s heavenly.

He speaks on the issues of love, loss, family, friendship, and recognition over a slick Dynamic Superiors sample from No I.D. Having been through all of that in the last year or so and seeing others go through comparable situations, it just resonated with me. It just reminded me how sorry I feel for the ageist rap fans. Sure, Nas is over 40 years old, but the themes he covers are always relatable. No different from the works of Shakespeare.

There’s a tendency to only give props to Jay Z as he ages in this genre, and its appropriate that the two have been pitted against one another nearly their entire careers. With Nas,his life can be just as messy as ours, he doesn’t need to do too many interviews on these things because he uses the music to speak through it. Truthfully, it sounds like his form of therapy. He talks to the listeners as a peer, not as some superior preacher.

I’m surprised that so many of these tracks weren’t used for albums, as everything here trumps the EP he put out with Kanye just over a year ago. That project lacked something and Nas captures it on this last track that starts and ends with a monologue. The last one seems to be aimed at his ex-wife, Kelis, and their ongoing custody battle. It conjures much of the same emotion he put forth back in 2012 on “Bye Baby”. The title of the song seems to be a tribute to his last verse on that song regarding the courage to endure hard times and still see the beauty in life. It shows a man that has met great successes and failures in the public eye and continues to push on despite all of it. I’m just thankful that this music is still around to lend motivation when I need it.