The one song that makes Nas cringe: “I made a mistake”
Nas has created some of the greatest songs in hip-hop history, but his record isn’t perfect. He’s also made some duds, and he knows that, too.
During a conversation for XXL with Tyler, the Creator in 2011, Nas was asked if he had any songs that made him “cringe.” It turned out that, indeed, he does. “There’s plenty,” he admitted.
Nas highlighted a track called ‘Blaze a 50,’ which featured on a compilation called The Lost Tapes. Released in 2002, the album is made up of previously unreleased songs that were recorded during the sessions for his albums I Am… and Stillmatic.
“It’s a story, and I say ‘Palm Springs,’” Nas said of the problematic track. “I say, ‘I was at Palm Springs, at Al Capone’s suite.’ I thought in Palm Springs there was a hotel and a suite that Al Capone always stayed at. I misread, or I was too high back then. But he had a home on Palm Island, in Florida. But ‘Palm’ tripped me up. Palm Springs is the more famous, I think.”
Nas had gotten his facts wrong while writing the track, and, a decade or so later, reflecting on it to Tyler, it still bothered him. “So I cringe at that because I made that mistake,” he said.
The error made Nas cringe, but, at the same time, he wasn’t going to lose too much sleep over it. “But fuck it,” he said. “So what? Chalk it up to the blunts. The song is called ‘Blaze a 50.’ Blaze a $50 bag of weed. So shit like that happens.”
Having just admitted to ‘Blaze a 50’ making him cringe, Nas then seemed to talk himself out of his self-critical state of mind and was now retracting the sentiment entirely. “But I don’t really cringe about it,” he now claimed, performing mental gymnastics somewhat.
Nas tried to explain that, while he recognised the mistake he made in the song, there was an honesty to it. He hadn’t deliberately set out to rap an untruth, because, at the time he wrote and recorded the track, he believed that what he was saying was true. “But it’s honestly you and your thoughts,” he said. “So to you, you hear it now, and you say, ‘Damn, I made a mistake.’ Nah, it’s the way you saw it.”
Making mistakes, as Nas argued, is just part of the process of making art. “It’s like an artist when he’s painting, and he doesn’t like what he did, and he wants to throw it away, so he starts a new canvas,” he said. “That’s just the way you felt like expressing it that day. That’s it. So it’s nothing to beat yourself up about.”
The way he spoke about ‘Blaze a 50,’ it sounds like Nas does regret his mistake and that he finds it cringe. But, at the same time, it’s not the end of the world. It’s just a part of writing and creating.