The story behind Nas song ‘2nd Childhood’
With the release of Nas and DJ Premier’s recent collaborative album, Light-Years, there has been plenty of reasons to reflect on the pair’s past collaborations. While they never previously made an album together, they did work on lots of tracks, and ‘2nd Childhood’ is one of the best.
‘2nd Childhood’ appears on Stillmatic, Nas’ fifth album and arguably his best since second album It Was Written. His previous effort, Nastradamus, was widely perceived to be a poor one, but Stillmatic helped Nas to recover his reputation.
The track ‘2nd Childhood’ was an example of Nas’ thoughtfulness and eloquence in action. It saw the rapper look back on his own past, while, at the same time, commenting on those people who fail to grow up and mature as they should. Their adulthood, owing to their immaturity, is simple a second childhood.
“How many grownups do you see every day that still act like children?” Nas asked Rolling Stone in 2014, during a conversation about the meaning of the track. “It’s a shame.”
Nas felt it was a crucial subject to tackle, given how prevalent a phenomenon it is. “In life,” he said, “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.”
Nas, speaking about the song’s meaning in 2014, seems to have been focusing on parents who lack the maturity to properly raise their children. But more than a decade later, given our particular political moment and the general quality of the ruling class, it is possible to read this track in a broader sense. It was released in 2001, but it speaks to the immaturity and childishness that today constitutes a social and political norm.
In terms of the music, DJ Premier was on hand to put together the beat. He spoke about this on the Rap Radar podcast in 2017, describing the track as “dope” and recalling that it came about while he was on his way to a party with DJ Riz.
Preemo had promised Nas that he would sort out a beat for the upcoming Stillmatic record, so his mind was on that instead of the party. He, in his words, “tapped out” and instead ended up finding a track that he would sample in ‘2nd Childhood.’ That was Peabo Bryson and Roberta Flack’s 1983 song ‘Born to Love.’
“I just heard that groove,” Preemo said of ‘Born to Love,’ “and I was like yo, it’s slow, but Nas can mess with this. I didn’t have the scratches or nothing, just the beat. And I sent it to him, and he was like, ‘Yo, I’m coming in tomorrow,’ and he laid it the next day. And then I did the scratches.”