Credit: Mikamote

Nas achieved critical success with his debut album Illmatic in 1994. With his second project, It Was Written, released two years later, he explored a dramatic change of sound, partly inspired by Biggie Smalls.

The Queensbridge rapper felt pressured to deliver “underground” music at that time in his career, but songs like ‘Juicy‘ and ‘Big Poppa’ showed him that, as a rapper from New York City, it was possible to cross over to the mainstream while remaining true to himself. So, he went and attempted just that.

“These dudes didn’t want me to sell records,” he told GQ. “They wanted me to stay on an underground level, and I understand what they mean a little bit. But at the same time, Biggie made it different, where you can’t just be the hot dude that they liked from New York to Connecticut to Virginia. You got to hit the mainstream. You got to touch the world.”

Nas created a new sound with The Trackmasters, which many people weren’t ready for. Referencing the likes of DJ Premier, Pete Rock and Q-Tip, he said, “I saw the same producers that I had worked with were now giving everybody else beats and then throwing me the same beats. That just wouldn’t do it for me. So, I decided to make my rap style a little bit harder for them to follow.

“They’re not going to follow me on a song like ‘The Message’. They’re not going to follow me on ‘I Gave You Power’. They’re definitely not going to follow me on ‘If I Ruled the World’. I got Lauryn Hill on it. They [didn’t] even fully get the Fugees at the time.”

It Was Written debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, selling 270,000 copies in its first week. To this day, it’s Nas’ best-selling LP and has been certified triple platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America.

One of the songs on the album, ‘Nas Is Coming’, saw him team up with Dr Dre, which Nas believes helped Biggie and Bone Thugs-N-Harmony join forces on ‘Notorious Thugs’. “I feel like that collab brought in the idea, maybe, for things like Bone Thugs-N-Harmony and Biggie together,” he explained. “I didn’t invent it, but it made it more of a thing, like, ‘Hey guys, we’re always so standoffish. You come into my market, I come into your market, and let’s have fun. It’s all a family thing.’”

Nas was featured on ‘Living in Pain’ alongside Tupac Shakur and Mary J Blige from Biggie’s 2005 posthumous album, Duets: The Final Chapter. However, they never got the chance to release music when he was alive, admitting he “got too high” during their studio sessions.

“I was in the studio and Big was rolling up some of that chocolate from Brooklyn – and he didn’t warn me,” he told The Breakfast Club. “It was just – I was zonked out, yo. There’s pictures of that session out there. We was supposed to do a couple of songs. I was gon’ remix some stuff for Ready to Die.”