Nas and DJ Premier’s five best songs
It has been a long time coming, but Nas and DJ Premier are releasing their first collaborative album together. They’ve been teasing this project for the best part of two decades now, but, with the release of Light-Years, it’s finally here. It marks the peak of a long-lasting musical relationship.
The road to get to this point has been a long one, with Nas hinting as far back as 2006 that he and Preem were working on a record together. By 2011, they still had nothing to present to the public, although Nas was still openly suggesting that an album was coming. But years and years went by, and no album was ever released. It was only in 2024 that, finally, things began to shift.
In April that year, Nas and Premier dropped the single ‘Define My Name’ in celebration of the 30-year anniversary of Nas’ seminal record Illmatic, which Preem had done some production work on. The song itself served as an announcement that the pair’s long-planned collaborative album was actually on the way. It ultimately took a further year-and-a-bit for it to be released, but, at last, we’ve arrived at that point.
Light-Years is the first album in which Nas and Premier have shared equal billing, but they’ve worked with each other multiple times before. As mentioned, Preem produced some tracks on Illmatic, but he also worked on some of Nas’ other albums, while Nas, in turn, has rapped on some of Prem’s records. Theirs has been a fruitful working relationship going back decades, so, bearing that in mind, these are five of the best songs they ever made together.
Nas and DJ Premier’s five best songs
5. ‘I Gave You Power’
Following the success of Illmatic, released in 1994, the pressure was on Nas to match his own great heights with his follow-up. His second album, It Was Written, arguably isn’t as much of a classic as Illmatic, but it certainly holds its own—and ‘I Gave You Power’ is a highlight. Told from the perspective of a gun, it’s quite a strange song infused with a touch of jazz courtesy of Premier’s production. “Instead of making this hard, mean shit,” Preem remembers thinking around the time he created it, as he recalled to Complex in 2012, “let me make it sound sad.”
As for Nas, his life had come to be bleakly shaped by firearms around this point in his life—and the song spoke to that. “I was around a lot of guns then,” he told Complex for that same feature. “Guns were in my sleep, in my car, in my home, on my person, on my friends. That’s how much they were around. It’s crazy to think about that today, but it was my reality. It was in my head 24/7.”
4. ‘2nd Childhood’
Illmatic casts a shadow across all of Nas’ career, with many of his subsequent releases, in one way or another, reaching for the same levels of quality that he achieved with his debut. For his fifth album, Stillmatic, he made that pursuit of Illmatic’s brilliance explicit, with the title specifically invoking the memory of Illmatic and with much of its content concerned with similar themes of philosophy and social consciousness. After a number of rough releases in the gangsta rap mould, Stillmatic proved to be a return to form for Nas.
The Premier-produced ‘2nd Childhood’ was one of the album’s best tracks, with Nas rapping about people who have difficulty saying goodbye to their youth. “How many grownups do you see every day that still act like children?” he asked Rolling Stone in 2014. “It’s a shame. In life, with your woman, your man, your family, there’s grownups who you expect so much more from are just really nothing more than a child. They’re big kids and these are people with power I’m talking about, so ‘2nd Childhood’ was very important.”
3. ‘Nas Is Like’
‘Nas Is Like’ was selected as the first single from I Am…, Nas’ third album released in 1999, and, as is typical of a Preem beat, there’s some interesting sampling on it. In addition to several instances of Nas’ own rapping from previous songs being scratched in and out, there is also a sample of birdsong and also a profoundly obscure track that Preem had once come by in a record store. He was actually very close to throwing the record that featured this song away, but, luckily, he listened to it just before he did—and he liked it. He used it on the track that became ‘Nas Is Like,’ and, for years, fans had no idea what it was. It was only years later that it emerged it was John Rydgren and Bob R. Way’s song ‘What Child Is This?’ released in 1966.
“So I made that record on my way to meet Nas,” Preem reflected to Complex. “All I had was the birds chirping in the beginning of the beat. And I had that ‘Nas, nas, nas, nas, nas, nas is like.’ I didn’t have the music, but I mean I knew that was the sample I wanted to mess with because I did freestyle, just reversing the record back and forth. So Nas said, ‘Yo, I got it. I’m going to call it ‘Nas is Like.’’ And we cut it in one day. Later he called me and said, ‘Yo, this is going to be my first single.’ I said, ‘I got a single with you?’ Because he had a single with Large Professor, Pete Rock, Q-Tip, and I wanted one too.”
2. ‘NY State of Mind’
One of the singles from Illmatic, ‘NY State of Mind’ is one of Nas’ classic songs—and it largely came down to the genius of DJ Premier and his taste for jazz music. Two jazz tracks were sampled in the song—‘Mind Rain’ by Joe Chambers and ‘Flight Time’ by Donald Byrd—and they were mixed together with other samples from songs by Kool & the Gang and Eric B & Rakim. Drawing all these different sounds together, Preem managed to create a sparse, distinctly unsettling beat, which Nas took great inspiration from in the studio.
“Nas watched me build the beat from scratch,” Preem once told Complex. “And he wrote the verse in the studio. If you listen to ‘N.Y. State of Mind’ you’ll hear him going, ‘I don’t know how to start this shit,’ because he literally just wrote it. Before he started the verse, I was signaling him going, ‘One, two, three,’ and he just goes in like, ‘Rappers I monkey flip’em, in the funky rhythm.’ He did that in one take. After he did that first verse, he goes, ‘How was that? Did that sound all right?’ And we were just like, ‘Oh, my God! The streets are going to go crazy when they hear this!’”
1. ‘Memory Lane (Sittin’ in da Park)’
On ‘Memory Lane (Sittin’ in da Park),’ Preem manages to invoke a real sense of nostalgia, which is perfect for the song’s content. Lyrically Nas is reflecting on the life he led as a teenager, which had moved so fast that he’d already felt like a man from far too young an age. Clearly, not everything in Nas’ adolescence was easy, but there is, nonetheless, a clear yearning for those days within the song’s lyrics, which is only highlighted by the vibe that Preem achieved with the music. His usage of Reuben Wilson’s organ-heavy track ‘We’re in Love’ is key to the sound of ‘Memory Lane.’
Speaking to XXL about the song, Preem reflected, “Nas wanted to help me pick a sample for that, and he heard the Reuben Wilson sample and he was like, ‘That’s it.’ I wasn’t really into that one. But he was like, ‘Yo, that’s it, Preem. Cook that up.’ So I just hooked it up, because he asked me to. I was in competition with the other producers on the album, so I wanted to be funkier than what they had.”