Review Summary: An excellent follow up to one of the best Hip Hop albums of all time.
Achieving Perfection isn’t always a good thing, especially for a recording artist. There have been a number of artists to release classic debut albums only to spend the remainder of their career floundering in a sea of bitterness and disappointment after failing to live up to the legacy of said album and the lofty expectations that come with it. Case in point Nas, whose debut album Illmatic has come to define not only him but in many ways the genre of Hip Hop itself. With its stellar production and Nas’s highly complex poetic lyricism, Illmatic was hailed by critics and hardcore hip hop fans as everything that was right with the genre. Of course critical acclaim isn’t everything. After a year Illmatic had yet to go gold, leaving Nas back home in Queens wondering what went wrong and how to fix it.
Apparently the remedy was to become a Mafioso. Piggy backing off Raekwons’ coke- rap masterpiece Only Built for Cuban Linx…, Nas 1996 Sophomore album It Was Written is a drastic shift in direction from the old school vibe of Illmatic to a coke filled fantasy centered around Nas’s new persona Escobar. Where Illmatic was produced by such Hip Hop luminaries as Pete Rock, DJ Premier, and Large Professor, It Was Written is produced almost solely by Puff Daddy protégés The Trackmasters. You would think such a drastic shift in subject matter would lead to disaster but instead It Was Written is easily Nas’s most cohesive and listenable album to date. From the opening song “The Message” which samples Stings “Shape of My Heart”, it’s apparent that Nas has lost nothing as a lyricist. What he’s actually talking about isn’t always clear but his flow is mesmerizing and with lines like; there’s one life, one love, so there can only be one King, It’s hard not to be sucked in. But by far the highlight of the album is the Dj Premier produced “I Gave You Power”. Rapping from the point of view of a gun Nas explores the feelings of the weapon from the shelf to the middle of a gunfight. Nas's imaginative lyrics combined with Premiers chilling production lead to a stunningly inventive track and one of the best concept songs you will ever hear. From there Nas settles into his central theme of cocaine and the typical violence that comes with it. The album flows from song to song seamlessly, dipping only on the Dr. Dre produced “Nas is coming”. While they should be commended for collaborating at the height of the East Vs West feud, the song is one of Dre’s worst beats and the hook which is just the title being repeated over and over is beyond annoying. The album ends with the single “If I ruled the world”, criticized for being to pop, it’s a positive if sometimes contradictory dream world where Nas raps about raising children in peace and doing coke in the same song. With an excellent hook from Lauryn Hill, it’s one of the better songs Nas has made.
For and album that was criticized so much at the time of release, It Was Written has aged better than the majority of albums of the era and though not exactly on Illmatic's level it is a excellent album that rates with the best of the mid 90’s coke-rap albums.
