In February 1999, just before the mp3 era reached its peak, 13 tracks from Nas’ forthcoming double LP I Am....The Autobiography leaked onto the internet. With the core of the album in the wild almost two months before the scheduled release date, Nas and his team at Columbia panicked, scrapping the original tracklist and pushing back the album release date.
I Am....The Autobiography was intended as a concept double-album, with one disc recounting his life from birth to death by suicide and the second dedicated to his afterlife. The leak blew up that grand scheme, and the album was officially released as the haphazardly assembled single-disc I Am, without most of the leaked songs. Some would be released as part of the career nadir that was late ’99’s Nastradamus, but the rest circulated for years in varying fidelity, creating an aura of mystique around these “lost” tracks. When they finally saw an official release in 2002 as The Lost Tapes, it solidified the resurgence sparked by 2001’s Stillmatic and the legendary beef with JAY-Z.
But The Lost Tapes 2 is a sequel in name only. Originally meant for a 2003 release, the project was delayed by his signing with Def Jam and their subsequent disagreements, and it’s unlikely this compilation is the same as the one he intended to release back then. Miles away from the leaked gems on The Lost Tapes—considered some of Nas’ best work—this sequel comprises detritus from the last decade or so of Nas’ storied career.
Even if the lows of Nas’ post-millennium output have been plagued by corny hooks and questionable beat selection, his failures were often in the service of experimentation—or in the case of Nastradamus, a rushed production process—and he’s never lacked access to the game’s premier production talents. The credits for The Lost Tapes 2 reads like a hip-hop all-star team: Swizz Beatz, Pharrell Williams, Kanye West, No I.D., RZA, Hit-Boy, Eric Hudson, DJ Dahi, Pete Rock, and the Alchemist are all featured. And there are indeed some highlights: The Swizz Beatz-produced “No Bad Energy,” a moody slow-burner washed in atmospheric background vocals that suits his wistful nostalgia, the crunchy lo-fi wizardry of RZA’s “Highly Favored,” or the vintage Queens boom-bap of Pete Rock’s standout “Queensbridge Politics,” in which Nas plays the wise old uncle, at his most comfortable and confident.
But it’s tragic to hear what he’s done with some of these productions. For much of the record, Nas sounds like he’s trying too hard. “It Never Ends” is a swirling piano beat from Alchemist primed for a laid back flow that Nas...inexplicably yells over, biting The Notorious B.I.G.’s infamous “Seven Mac-11’s…” line in what appears to be a tribute. This mismatched energy is also apparent on a perfectly serviceable beat from Pete Rock (“The Art of It”), in which Nas sandwiches a single decent verse (“Pulled out the barrel/Four-fifths rip through bone marrow/Make his toes spiral the dirt/While his feet kick up rock, he’s a sprinter”) in between two head-shakers (“A life, Adidas under A, the B for beater, Bottega/British Knights sneaker...” and so on through the alphabet). “Beautiful Life,” his most direct reference to his divorce from the singer Kelis, offers no real clarity to their mutual allegations of abuse, and its celebratory tone leaves a stale aftertaste. Like most of the songs on Lost Tapes 2, it never should have seen the light of day, a sentiment that was, at one point, shared by Nas himself. That he would release an album that didn’t even meet his own standards is dispiriting.
