The Queensbridge legend’s 13th album marks a retreat into a nostalgia-act comfort zone, one that suits him even as it yields diminishing returns.
By all measures, the rollout of 2018’s NASIR, the fourth project of Kanye West’s chaotic Wyoming summer, was a mess. Marred by Nas’ lazy flows and conspiracy theories, the album also arrived under the troubling cloud of domestic abuse allegations from his ex-wife Kelis. Nas’ 13th album, King’s Disease, seeks a return to the cozy wistfulness of 2012’s Life Is Good, a late-career opus which toured ’80s stash spots and triumphant nights at the Apollo while ostensibly interrogating the dissolution of his marriage. The new album marks a retreat into a nostalgia-act comfort zone—one which suits Nas, even as it yields diminishing returns.
There’s desperation in the way Nas endlessly plumbs the scenes of his adolescence, like a red-eyed wedding guest clutching your shoulder three hours into the reception and pleading, “Remember?” This is the rapper who cruised “Memory Lane” at 20, who at 28 excoriated peers unable to leave behind the emotional confines of their Queensbridge childhood. Yet by his late thirties, Nas had become so convinced of the importance of those years—the sanctity of Cold Crush park jams, the unforgettable eyelashes on that girl down Vernon Boulevard—and, in an odd display of humility, less concerned with his own place in them. On “Car #85,” a summertime ride through Koch-era New York, Charlie Wilson’s background vocals lend period-specific authenticity to Nas’ vivid memories of “White Castles at midnight, fish sandwiches, forty-ounces and fistfights.” In middle age, he’s a full-on evangelist for the lost city of his youth, and for the days just before Illmatic changed everything.
By now groaning about Nas’ beat selection is the rap-fan equivalent of complaining about the weather, but Southern California native Hit-Boy, best known for his credits on “N****s in Paris” and “Backseat Freestyle,” acquits himself pretty well as the resident producer on King’s Disease. Despite the synthetic sheen of his single-tracked pianos, digitized snares, and clap drums, his beats are stately without defaulting into the prescriptive mood music Nas generally prefers. His audio templates have proven adaptable enough for the likes of Dom Kennedy and SOB X RBE; he evokes an easy brightness on the Anderson .Paak collaboration “All Bad” and the A$AP Ferg-featuring “Spicy.” Nothing jumps out as an anthem or single, and it’s hard to fathom which prospective consumer demos are mobilized by Big Sean and Lil Durk’s appearances.
Just as relieving for those who suffered through NASIR’s arrhythmic vocals, the flow which seemed to abandon Nas after Life Is Good appears more or less restored on King’s Disease. Even in his heyday, Nas would never have been mistaken for the most musical MC, but his ability to ride a bassline conferred a smoothness to his hyper-literate bars; on NASIR, the looseness of Kanye’s capacious productions resulted in something akin to a poetry slam. Long gone are the nested, multisyllabic rhyme schemes of the Illmatic-to-Stillmatic arc, but Nas sounds positively energized on “Blue Benz,” rapping about Jersey City madams and excursions to the Tunnel with Chris Lighty. He delivers an inspired opening verse on “The Cure,” keeping time without a snare until the song’s second-act beat switch.
Nas tends to falter when tackling capital-S Subjects (King’s Disease is blessedly devoid of any Plandemic speculation), and he’s better at coaxing pathos from characters he observes or creates than he is at autobiographical soul-searching, his stony affect strained by intimacy. King’s Disease unfolds with a thematic scope suitable for reminiscence and self-coronation, with a bit of the Marcus Garvey-inspired liberation theory he’s dabbled in since “If I Ruled the World.” In a few instances, the record manifests a vulnerability rare even in Nas’ most personal work, as on “Til the War Is Won,” when he curses God for taking his doting mother instead of his jazz-playing, jet-setting father.
But where the song is on its surface a paean to single mothers, Nas’ bemoaning of broken families culminates in a mealy-mouthed admonishment: “Women, stop chasing your man away/Men, stop acting crazy, chasing your woman away.” King’s Disease makes overtures of applauding women in a manner that feels defensive in light of the 2018 allegations. Still evident is the backhanded slut-shaming so eagerly cribbed by J. Cole, the unwitting as-a-father-of-a-daughter misogyny of 2012’s “Daughters”: on “Car #85” Nas recalls chasing a teenage crush to Co-op City only to find 10 fellow suitors waiting outside her building. Both “Replace Me” and “All Bad” address nameless exes, vacillating between spite and remorse without enough nuance or transparency to disburse any appreciable insights.
King’s Disease climaxes with “Full Circle,” which reunites The Firm’s 1996 lineup of Nas, AZ, Cormega, and Foxy Brown. In past Firm reunions, the reconvened members—titans of New York’s blockbuster era—looked back on their wild youths, warily contemplating their divergent paths. “Full Circle” is the closest they’ve come to an honest reckoning, each acknowledging missteps along the way. AZ, perpetually mid-champagne flute in toast to his impossible good fortune, admits to dishonesty in relationships: “The games that I was playin’ was silly/Similar to them days when I was packin’ that milly, it could’ve killed me.” Cormega, never one to forgive a slight or forget a grudge, rues his past control issues: “Thinking my girl was my possession—I stand corrected.” (It’s strange that Foxy Brown was conscripted for this exercise in male redemption, and her verse belongs on a different song altogether.) There’s a memorial air to the proceedings, running mates who’ve drifted to the suburbs and whose kids attend different schools. Nas remains a prisoner of his own device, but that doesn’t mean his comrades can’t move on.
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