Nobody saw it coming. After the fiasco with Nasir (2018) from Ye’s acclaimed Wyoming Sessions and The Lost Tapes 2, it didn’t look like the game would be getting anything new from Nas any longer. Nas, who’d already last for more than twenty years at that point. Then King’s Disease happen amid a world-changing 2020.
Two more albums later, and a Grammy, the Queensbridge native has returned with the concluding – I’d like to think – installment of his King’s Disease series. At the ripe age of forty-nine, the vet MC’s sixteenth album, his fourth with record maestro Hit-Boy, sees him notching a new prime with his rhymes and shedding the limiting skin of retrogressive 90s nostalgia.
Silencing the ‘Nas Picks Whack Beats’ Narrative
“First time you heard Nas / You probably heard somebody say that I pick bad beats” – Nas on “First Time”
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of King’s Disease, when taken as a complete series, is the way Hit-Boy’s production has cured Nas’ already lengthy stay with the mic, adding more flavour to it while extending the strength of its goodness. Nas is a celebrated hip-hop icon, some of his best works are still being dissected on college tables by the sharpest eyes and minds of professors.
Hit-Boy, on the other hand, is an accomplished producer, boasting a Grammy-winning catalogue, which includes The Throne’s ‘Niggas in Paris’ and Bey’s ‘Sorry’. In KDIII, Nas slips comfortably into lavish HB beats, telling stories, imparting wisdom, and having fun with it as much as he did on Illmatic and It Was Written.
At the same time, he taps in the pocket of maturity from Life is Good and God’s Son. The result is a harmonious compromise between the lyrics and the sound: a good thing for any marriage to work.
Some of the most ear-tingling parts from the latest of the Nas-HB affair come in glimpses, such as when you listen to certain songs and realize that each one’s personality has been extracted from the DNA of the previous albums.
In ‘Serious Interludes’, one of the album’s standout tracks, the soft thumping beat borrows from the texture of the first installment’s ‘The Cure’ and ‘Car #85’; in both songs, Nas is at his lyrical finest, butter-smooth flows, clear, and with the sheen on them. ‘30’ sees the QB legend go back to the original album to complement the drill-infused ‘27 Summers’. ‘Goin’ on thirty summers’, he raps on the hook, flexing his historic run in the rap game. ‘Once a Man, Twice a Child’ forces Nas to recreate a reflective rap from the template of KDII’s ‘Moments’. ‘Michael & Quincy’ and ‘WTF SMH’ utilize radical beat switches that have been the watermark of all KD albums.
Every track feels like a carefully thought-out revision from the previous outings.
Embracing What is Now, Not What Could Be… Or Should’ve Been
Nas stated his intentions well with the beginning of the KD series, and he rehashes it with KDIII: to evolve. The theme has been one of growth across the trilogy. For the greater part of his career, Nas has had to shoulder the burden of the ever-growing legacy of his landmark 1994 debut, an album every single last one of his works has had the bad luck of being unfairly compared to.
And for the longest of times, this curse took a toll on him; one could hear it heavy in his raps loaded with cloying nostalgia. However, in KDIII, the self-styled God’s son seems more content with what he has become. He has now pushed past folding himself, his raps, and his outlook to fit them all into the restricting envelope of his ealier self who first stormed into the scene on ‘Live from the Barbeque’.
He touched on this in passing on Magic (2021), this problem of getting stuck in the past. In KDIII, Nas makes a decisive statement that the person he is right now is someone he’s happy with enough to live with fully in the present moment. Yes, he’s still from Queensbridge (Queens in the house!). Of course, he’ll always be that guy from the projects.
This time, however, he goes about talking of his origins as something he looks back on with a fond smile. He’s smiling because of how near it feels to his heart rather than because of grudging resentment that causes him to tread in that direction which traps him in the resin of over-reminiscing. The result is a cosmopolitan work, probably Nas’s most so far.
The most obvious part that tells of this transition comes from ‘Thun’, where Esco references his now-mythical beef with fellow rapper-turned-mogul Jay-Z. The jocular jab didn’t come heavy with some latent grudge but from a place of growth and maturity. That’s a new and rather refreshing facet of Nas. For him to approach the epoch-making phase of his career as he would pass an uncle joke speaks volumes of his mind state. This is a grown man in his big man era and he’s made peace with his past to actually laugh it off rather than look back with a frown, hoping for a do-over to drop out of the heavens so he can correct things.
If KDIII is the last of this synergy between Nas and Hit, then it’s the most polished of the efforts. The pair’s prolific run with the pen and the sound has birthed a gem. KDIII’s lyrical fullness, graphic storytelling, mindfulness, dense performances, and lush production make the first two volumes and Magic feel like rough takes.
There’s a set of gold ingots engraved ‘KD 3’ on the album cover, and the project has fulfilled everything the picture implied about its existence and its content: nothing but golden bars.
