"My mom got me a typewriter when I was, like, 11," says Nas. "I got plenty good on it, too. I was up to 50 or 60 words a minute." Kicking back in his record label's Manhattan office, the 25-year-old Nasir Jones doesn't exactly look like he's headed for the typing pool. Decked out in the blue-and-orange haunte-urban color scheme of the season--in his own Esco line, of course--he's slouched in a chair, sipping bottled water, and talking in the airy tones of an after-hours jazz musician. "I used to freestyle all the time," he says. "Now I suck." But as any hard-core hip-hop fan will tell you, no one rocks the Olivetti like Nas. "With Nas, every lyric is visual," labelmate Wyclef Jean once said. "You could just take a song, write it down, put it in a book, and read it." Indeed, Nas all but invented a new school of hip-hop realism on his 1994 debut, Illmatic. A word-drunk masterpiece of ghetto reportage, the album describes baseheads, task force raids, and other facts of life in the projects in such quickly unfolding narratives that it defined a new genre: the book on DAT. Now, on is third solo album, I Am..., he's revisiting the early-90s New York aesthetic of spare sound and vivid imagery, leaving behind the Mafioso posturing and swooping crane shots of his recent past. In the years since emerging as hip-hop's messiah, Nas has released the more commercial solo album It Was Written, made a soundtrack for a bullet-riddled imaginary mob movie with rap supergroup the Firm, and learned a lot about the dangers of life in hip-hop's Playa's Club. "I think the big purchase I really regret was all the marijuana," he says. "I probably spent $2-3,000 a week on weed." Call this Nas's Hollywood period--he also costarred in Hype Williams's Belly as a credible, conflicted drug dealer, and even cowrote some of Will Smith's Big Willie Style. While Nas's recent projects have had their literary high points--including "I Gave You Power," a song told from the perspective of a Desert Eagle semiautomatic on It Was Written--they stray from the gritty tales of the Timberland-shod street narrator who emerged in '94. "I was just flowin'," Nas says of his early years. "It was just straight from living in the projects, with all those ideas and music in my head."
Though Nas grew up in the rap feeder school of Queensbridge Projects--fellow alums include Mobb Deep, Biz Markie, and Rakim--at least some of that music in his head came from his father, jazz trumpeter Olu Dara (who played on Illmatic). "My pops always had a lot of music around the house, so we'd blow the trumpet and play the guitar and the flute and all that shit," Nas says. His own musical interests took a less classical direction--"I always wanted my mom to get me a Roland 808"--and Nas soon found his metier. Already writing his own comic books featuring heroes such as a boxer named Honey-boy and a superhero named Sea Man ("He was like Aquaman and Conan combined"), the young author inevitably gravitated to such hip-hop storytellers as Kool G Rap and Rakim. Nas once again looks to them for inspiration on I Am..., which he hopes will garner both the props of his first album and the multiplatinum chart success of his second. And while it does include trendy guest spots by the likes of Timberland and Aaliyah, it also includes sharp-eyed ghetto sociology, song-length metaphors, and a distinctly intellectual way with the boast. On the bombastic anti-playa-hater anthem "Hate Me Now," Nas claims not to be the richest or pimpin'-est rapper but rather the "most critically acclaimed / Best storyteller / Thug narrator." In the age of No Limit financial values, it's almost touching, as is the new song "Money Is My Bitch." "Yeah, I had a falling out with money," Nas says. "If she was a nice woman instead of a bitch, she would've treated me good. But she's just my bitch, so I can't really let her run my life." - Spin Magazine in June, 1999.
