Paul Thompson hits blunts hard as Ray Mercer
“Mama should have cuffed me to the radiator” – Nas, 1999
The critical revisionism on It Was Written is a good thing. In recent years, Nas’ sophomore effort has finally been recognized as the frantic, vital look at New York that it is—all affecting crime tales and all-world rapping, the kind that made him the city’s golden child in the first half of the ‘90s. The problem was that it came from a new vantage point. If Illmatic was from a young man perched by his project window, the follow-up was Nas imagining himself in the thick of the action. In hindsight, the crime boss play-acting barely even registers; the suits just aren’t that shiny.
But as ’96 came and went, the prevailing opinion decried Nas’ ill-conceived grasps for fame that didn’t become him. He was a sellout. He was faker than the new hundred. And when his planned third record, the double album I Am… The Autobiography fell victim to pervasive bootlegging, the king from Queensbridge fell deeper into the rabbit hole. The single-disc version of I Am… and the shoddy Nastradamus were everything fans had feared. Save a few songs, the albums lacked nuance—a shame, because the tension of Nas’ ongoing identity crisis has always been fascinating. No song captures that search for perspective better than “Purple”.
Two short years after Nastradamus, the ship had been righted. Stillmatic reestablished Nas as not only a critical favorite, but as a rapper with serious cultural import. “Purple” is Nas tackling what it means to hold so much power and self-doubt at the same time. It was released on The Lost Tapes, a twelve-song collection of B-sides, rarities, and demos that Columbia released nine months after Stillmatic. Many of the songs had surfaced on advance copies of I Am… and Nastradamus. As such, The Lost Tapes is one of the keys to cracking Nas’ career—a great record in its own right, but essential as a counterpoint to the sloppy crossover attempts that dominated his late-‘90s work.
“You sell your man out—not even your girl is sacred.”
The most enduring image of Nas’ struggle to keep up in the turn-of-the-century commercial arms race is the video for “Hate Me Now”. (When Puffy has second thoughts about a video’s tastefulness, you have probably crossed a line.) He dragged a cross through the desert; he and Diddy rapped on top of buildings and wore a lot of fur. But the second line of “Purple” is an off-hand reset on the whole thing: “I don’t like the way P. Diddy did Shyne with different lawyers.” Apropos of nothing, Nas slides back into the role of the righteous outsider, peering down from the rooftop.
More importantly, Nas steps outside of himself. It’s delivered in the second person, but the second verse of “Purple” is a strikingly self-aware look at the power he wields: “You got a bunch of thugs even now that’s ready/Trusting your judgment, quick to put it down, they deadly.” Nas reduces all of this—his friends, the promotional cycles he had just run through, the parties, the crime—into a tiny world, turning it over in his hands, studying but ambivalent: “’Weed smoke, three tokes, nigga, pour more Henny’/He sighs with eyes that’s seen a war too many.” For once, everything makes sense. The perspective comes easily. Nas will prevail.
“The whole city is mine, pretty as dawn.”
