Nas & DJ Premier - Define My Name (new single out now, album releasing later this year)

[NoHalfWay]

I love that beat bruh. Lol. I can't find what's wrong with it. Has like a haunting feel to me. Like alot of Dame Grease beats.

It’s that nostalgia prolly big dawg

I like dame grease too tho i wish “U wanna Play Rough” made the retail version of I Am…

 

[Awesome Wells]

That beat is horrible



I bought the cassette after school on the release date. We'd bring The Source to school and talk about hip hop so getting 5 mics was huge. It was a long ass wait from their review to when the album came out. Might have been two months. Not to mention we waited 3 years for Nasty Nas to put an album out. All we had was Live at the BBQ, Halftime, and Back to the Grill so he was damn near an urban legend. We thought he just disappeared and was never coming out with anything else. No mixtapes or social media then.

I remember popping the tape in for the bus ride home and being in awe but overwhelmed by the lyricism. Normally you'd catch everything on the first listen but not Nas. No one was rhyming like that at the time. NY State of Mind especially. That song is still #1 for me. No one was telling stories with that level of detail and the beat

Doggystyle was still spinning and I couldn't even listen to it anymore. Snoop just sounded wack to me. 36 Chambers wasn't even hitting the same. Listen to Rae and Ghost on there and then Cuban Linx in 1995. Nas raised the bar and made them step up to another level.

Production was equally a step up. No one had a line up like that. Albums were only 1 producer at the time.

ALL TRUE!!

The only people that had Illmatic early, was Stretch and Bobbito because Bob had relationships at Columbia and helped Kurious get his deal there. So Nas was up at their show a few times talking about the album before it dropped, but you had to stay up between 1-5AM to record or hear any of the sh*t. I taped every single episode during their run up there! I would just buy mad blank cassettes and let them record all night until they stopped, then I would wake up and turn them over to the other side and go back to sleep! LOL!!

There was one time Nas was up there freestyling and Stretch was cutting while he was rhyming and he f*cked up and Nas got tight with him and told him he better start getting his timing together. Whole room was shook. HAHA!! But just like you said, nobody was rhyming like Nas in '94. So right after Illmatic dropped. there were a million Nas clones coming out from everywhere in the city, trying to sound like him. It was wild, but back then you would get called out for doing that. So none of them lasted long.

 

[up in here]

I love that beat bruh. Lol. I can't find what's wrong with it. Has like a haunting feel to me. Like alot of Dame Grease beats.

Ghetto Prisoners and Life I'd What You Make it both sound like they straight out of Donkey Kong Country.

Dame grease and L.E.S gave Nas better beats in Nastradamus

Life We Choose
Last Words
Family
God Love Us
Quiet nikkaz

Are all better than those two.

L.E.S did give Nas some other beats on I am I rock with though, and he also gave some less great beats on Nastradamus too. Just looking at the track lists of those two albums now I didn't even realize L.E.S did so much work on those two albums.

 

[qnsfinest]

Its live on Apple

 

[3Rivers]

 

[ThirdAct]

Ghetto Prisoners and Life I'd What You Make it both sound like they straight out of Donkey Kong Country.

Lol Donkey Kong Country soundtrack goes hard though...Aquatic Ambiance and Stickerbrush Symphony are my shyt!

Ghetto Prisoners beat reminds me of the Makaveli album for some reason, like @spliz said its that dark sound

 

[qnsfinest]

This nikka preem laced him. Dope beat.

They sampled nas is like

 

[Frump]

I consider the first “Magic” a timeless personal classic. I sometimes play the other KD’s and Magic’s but Magic 1 is the one I always run back in it’s entirety, often.

Same

It has that old Nas 90’s early 2000’s boom bap feel

 

[qnsfinest]

They dropping an album.

 

[John Mexico]

That’s cuz for the first 6 songs it was sounding like Nas best album

Then idk who co-signed that ghetto prisoners beat but shyt went up & down after that

1/3 of the production on that album aged like milk left on the dashboard in a Las Vegas parking lot.

Even Small World, a track that has a lot of elements I like, those fukking compressed Ocarina of Time ass flutes. The fukking compression in the late 90s, man.... I Want to Talk To You is just banging on a casio keyboard as well. Big Things lmao.

 

[Cladyclad]

Beat trash af

 

[Awesome Wells]

It's out now.

Nas is doing Nas things, but I ain't into the beat. Not by Primo standards. I knew it.

 

[Metal Face]

yeah Preemo washed fr

 

[deeman]

Get Premier the fukk outta here.

 

[BuddahMAC]

Preem trying to do weak drums on purpose to sound 'modern?'