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Who is Nasir? Illmatic endures still in the die-hard fan’s memory, a product of the Brooklyn poet, boasting an ill palate for blunts, Moët, and inkwells. Though, the young man from Queensbury projects is a far cry from the man we’re presented as Nasir. His output has somewhat soured since his 1994 debut and critical zenith, marred with arid production and lyrics, forsaking his biographical flair for the Mafioso vogue that defined a nascent Bling Era. Indeed, for a rapper so well regarded for his “unique” biographic struggle, Nas has had very little to say of either himself or the hood since Illmatic. We might glean from his ceaseless comparisons to divinity (“Nas is like… messiah type”) that Nas, at least, took critics praise to heart. Dead is Nas. Reigning since 1996’s It Was Written is Nas Escobar. Named after a Columbian drug lord, Nas Escobar is not The Street’s Disciple that Nas was, but the same man crucified alongside Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs on Hate Me Now. The bearer of a messiah complex, if Nas wrote the “thief’s theme”, he died one of two on Calvary.

Nasir, Nas’s 12th studio album, hints that it might finally tear through the messianic dross that’s haunted Nas for the last two decades. Instead, its opening moments reunite the two thieves, swapping ad-libs over a glitzy, tinny sample of Basil Poledouris’s Hymn to Red October. It’s the kind of beat only Nas could pick, a horrific call-back to the lazy, head-achy production of the Bling Era and marking Kanye’s first foray into the art of the ringtone beat. Thus “Escobar season” begins.

The cruel truth writ large over the twenty or so minutes of Nasir is that Nas swapped the Moët for “caviar”, losing the ill kid from Queensbridge in the process. It isn’t just his diet of Carbone, rigatoni and Bordeaux as boasted on Adam and Eve that bloats this album, a pervasive bitterness towards his riches, legacy pervades throughout.

Perhaps it’s just as the twitter sleuths pointed out, and this album is an exploration of the seven cardinal sins. But if this is the case, Nas epitomises these sins, rather than explores them; pride, envy and gluttony chief among them. It’s pride when he lauds himself among Egyptian gods (yet again) on Not for Radio, and it’s that same uncritical streak which leads him to state that Fox News was founded by a black man. “That’s true,” Nas approves, but only if Rupert Murdoch has been taking cues from J. Edgar Hoover (whom Nas also proclaims black). Besides, why would anybody want to thrust black success on two extremely problematic socio-political figures? If there’s a poetic irony to these proclamations, it can’t be discerned from the lyrics themselves. There’s no wry smile at the end of these verses, only Diddy, muffled in static echoing the 070 Shake hook “I think they scared of us”. Scared, I am, indeed.  

Where Nas lets the man slip through, we see a rich and curdled soul boasting about the kind of women and food he now gorges on. They may well be the same thing in Nas’s world, considering Bonjour where the Pologna is chef recommended, presumably as are the asses that he orders “the fattest” over Kanye’s stuttering string loops. They’re simply part of his three-course, off course existence as an out-of-touch dilettante; in his own words “Vacation, twisted, whatever happened, missed it.”

Where Nas attempts the political, he merely reinforces his professed ignorance. It’s been years since Yeezy has washed another conscious rapper on the mic, but on Cop’s Shot the Kid he does exactly this. Over an urgent sample of Slick Rick’s Children’s Story “Cops shot the kid… I still hear him screaming”, with a shrill Richard Pryor scream resounding throughout, Kanye describes the killing of a black child, just high off a single line, sliding home from a party and mercilessly gunned down by an almost off-duty officer. Nas’s verse is comparatively shallow, it’s like the fractured spoken word an ivy league college kid might produce having heard Illmatic.

Attempts at insight into the lives he’s happily transcended again hinders the anti-vaccine anthem Everything. Nas’s poetry is intact for at least four bars, “When the media slings mud, we use it to build huts” and “People do anything to be involved in everything, Inclusion is a hell of a drug” are as poignant as they are mellifluous, the former threatening some reflection on Nas’s part. However, the righteousness soon crumples as Nas rails against an infant’s first vaccinations, which he deems his first exposure to pain, wondering “Who’s gonna know how these side effects is gonna affect me?” His unenlightened attempts at critique come off like cloying hot-takes, they wouldn’t be amiss on a Fox pundit’s Twitter (perhaps The Black Rupert Murdoch is a nom de plume more befitting than Escobar). It’s a guru-esque grasp at profundity, but a far cry from befitting the ghetto Messiah.

The production on this record is sparse. It’s not signature Kanye, often sounding like Kanye’s attempt at golden-age jazz rap. The samples are allowed play out with relatively little chopping or screwing in most cases, and with Nas’s selection this can lead to some exhausting and eyebrow-raising beats which are more akin to Kanye throw-aways. The exceptions to this are the heavenly beats on Everything and Simple Things. Everything pits Kanye, who is not known for his singing (at all), in an enchanting duet between himself and The-Dream. His voice is sweet, and the sparse words are moving: “If I could change anything, I would change everything.” The last cut Simple Things sounds like Kanye’s been reading from DJ Koze’s sheet (DJ Koze’s Knock Knock being one of my albums of the year). It’s a unique beat within his catalogue, an extraordinary combination of the droning synths that lead congratulatory anthems like Celebration and We Major off Late Registration and ‘Old Kanye’ pitched sampled, which faintly murmur in the background!

Nas uses the former beat to heckle his critics and appraise his own lyrics as “more than just the surface”. With that in mind he may have dropped some truth-bombs on this album, yet considering both his naïve fondness for conspiracy and rumours of abuse from his ex-wife Kellis, “the ghetto Othello, the Moor” seems rather apt.

In any case, the Nasir presented on this record is an extremely cluttered and bitter man, who has only grown lonely and rancorous with fame and riches. “Before I had a piece of paper, peace was in my favour,” he raps on Adam and Eve. However, he contradicts himself constantly with cheap braggadocio and a diet that makes my capillaries crack on contact listening. It seems almost certain that Nas will continue to disengage the fans he once promised the world to. Nasir Escobar should blush for shame, though, it’s safe to presume all that Boudreaux might have flushed him enough already.