Kendrick Lamar’s favourite Nas album: “That’s genius”
Kendrick Lamar, as a Compton native, has always been steeped in the West Coast tradition of rap, but that isn’t to suggest he hasn’t looked further afield, too. Even though the East-West feud took place while he was a kid growing up, he listened to East Coast rappers, too, and Nas was one of his very favourites.
Nas’ first album, Illmatic, is widely regarded as one of hip-hop’s most important, but that’s not actually the one that sticks out most to Kendrick. As he explained to Complex back in 2012, it was album number five that he liked best: Stillmatic, released in 2001.
Stillmatic had come off the back of some poor releases for Nas. His second album had been received fairly well by audiences and critics, but albums three and four, I Am… and Nastradamus, really didn’t go down too well. On those records, he’d moved away from the socially conscious, political themes of his early music in favour of a more commercial-sounding, gangsta rap style. It did not suit him.
Nas’ career was suffering following the poor reception of I Am… and Nastradamus, so, preparing for Stillmatic, he recognised that he needed to return to his roots. It served as a more natural follow-up to Illmatic, dealing with many of the same themes, while it also bore some genuine innovations of its own. The album was a success, and it reestablished Nas as one of hip-hop’s great working artists.
One of the people following these developments was a teenage Kendrick Lamar. “That was a point in time where I was just into buying CDs heavy,” he recalled to Complex, “and that [Stillmatic] was one of them I purchased.”
Perhaps one of the reasons why a young West Coast kid like Kendrick felt comfortable listening to a New Yorker like Nas around that time was the fact that, at certain points, Stillmatic almost had a West Coast sound. That was certainly what Kendrick felt, as he explained in relation to one of the songs on the album: ‘The Flyest’, which featured the New York rapper AZ.
“I just thought it was a dope vibe,” Kendrick said of that track. “Had a West Coast feeling and spitting some of the most intricate lyrics on there.”
Another of Kendrick’s favourites from Stillmatic was ‘Rewind’, a song that is widely celebrated for its unique structure of storytelling. The song tells the story of a revenge killing, but it does so backwards. That is to say, the narrative begins with the murder and works backwards to reveal the events that had led up to the killing. People have noted how similar the track’s structure is to the Christopher Nolan movie Memento, which had come out only a year or so before the song was released.
The structure of ‘Rewind’ leads to some quite surreal moments, as when “the bullet goes back in the gun” or when “the clock went back from three to two to one.” It’s an extremely clever concept for a song, and it is delivered with a level of skill that few other rappers would ever be capable of achieving.
“It’s one of Nas’ best tactics as far as storytelling as well, him spitting raps backwards,” Kendrick said of ‘Rewind’. “I mean, come on. That’s genius.”