“All I could see in my dreams was guns. I kept having nightmares about cops, and this was a time where I was removed from the hood,” says Nas. “But I survived. I made it out.”
You might expect one of the chief architects of the 1990s “golden age of hip-hop” to look back on this era through rose-tinted glasses. Instead, the legendary rapper feels lucky to have made it out alive and knows that his face could easily have ended up on a graffiti mural next to those of his contemporaries, 2Pac and Biggie.
“Back then it was just gangsta, gangsta, gangsta,” Nas says. “It felt like the danger from the block was still right around the corner. We were young men who had to grow up so fast and there was a lot of responsibility on our shoulders. When we saw our favourite musicians get old, we just figured Al Green or Anita Baker had earned their stripes, that they were married with kids in some house near a river somewhere.”
Has he now achieved this dream for himself? “I’m able to look in the mirror and smile,” he says. “I want young black artists to get to that point too.”
Nas, 47, has sold more than 15m records in the US alone, and is firmly established as one of rap’s all-time greats. His 13th studio album, King’s Disease, released last year, is nominated for Best Hip-Hop Album at the Grammy Awards, due to take place on March 14.
But the middle-aged security he enjoys today is a long way from how his life began in New York’s Queensbridge Homes housing project. As he rapped on the chilling “My Way”: “Never knew murder until I saw my man get popped / no blood soaking, laying there, eyes still open / I got a little closer, put my hand in his palm / He was looking’ right through me, yo, starin’ beyond / I wonder what he saw?”
When Nas emerged in the early 1990s as a baby-faced teenager with an impossibly gravelly voice, his talent was obvious immediately. His 1994 debut album Illmatic painted a picture of New York that was just as vivid and visceral as those of authors such as Paul Auster or Hubert Selby Jr, and was quickly acclaimed as a masterpiece.
“I wanted people to smell and taste the air that was on my block,” he says. “I wanted people to visualise everything I was seeing — if I didn’t achieve that, I felt like I was wasting people’s time.” Now, he reveals, he is working on turning one of Illmatic’s most cinematic songs, “N.Y. State of Mind”, into a movie.
The 19-year-old Nas was already an old soul, elegantly philosophising about how his unborn son would be his resurrection while finding light in some of the darkest corridors of the black experience. He wasn’t just telling his story, but the story of how America sets up working-class black people to fail (“Each block is like a maze with a bunch of black rats trapped”), and the perseverance they must show to defy such dire odds.
I ask him if much has changed in America since then. “What’s changed is smartphones with cameras now exist, so we can recognise what happens in America for exactly what it is: straight up racism. Before cameras, even some black people didn’t realise how bad it was.”
lllmatic is only a small part of the story. Since then, Nas spotlighted the roots of slavery with an album originally named after the N-word, rapped from the perspective of a gun on “I Gave You Power”, and provided comfort to anyone who has ever grieved for a parent on “Dance”.
The fact that his friend Amy Winehouse was inspired by Nas in her own confessional songwriting, even penning a love letter to him in “Me and Mr Jones”, shows that his influence stretches far beyond rap. “When you talk about Amy, it almost brings water to my eyes,” he says. “She didn’t give a fuck about the Hollywood side of the business and was purely selfless to the art. She encouraged me to always stand on what I was standing on.” He takes a deep breath. “She was a spirit who maybe knew she wouldn’t be here long.”
Having dropped out of high school in the ninth grade, Nas tells me his music has long been driven by an urge to teach people the black history that isn’t taught in schoolbooks.
“The history of Africa is mystifying,” he says. “To be black has been a long journey, yet there’s a certain lineage that gets ignored, covered up and disrespected constantly. You can’t just start black history in schoolbooks with slavery; that’s just wrong in every single way!”
A slick, soulful trip down memory lane, King’s Disease is intended as a manual for young artists navigating the music industry. “The business is hard and not many artists make it. But as long as you keep your soul, so long as you are happy knowing you contributed something positive to the atmosphere, then you can’t lose. No one gets out unscathed, you know. There’s going to be some turbulence, but you’re here to make music, change lives and help people.”
There has been turbulence in Nas’s own life in recent years. He and singer-songwriter Kelis, mother of their 11-year-old son Knight, divorced in 2010. In a 2018 interview, she accused Nas of being violent towards her at points during their marriage. He vehemently denied the allegations in an open letter to her, but at a time when the voices of survivors of abuse are rightly being elevated, he is still facing criticism.
As if to reiterate his denial, “Til the War is Won” on King’s Disease’s uses a stirring sample from Barry Jenkins’ film If Beale Street Could Talk to celebrate powerful black women. “Single mothers, my heart is bleeding for ya / these coward men, that were beating on ya,” Nas raps, before adding a defiant: “Never me!”
I am told that he will not discuss the Kelis allegations; Nas considers his lengthy Instagram statement his final word. However, I do ask him how he feels about today’s social media landscape. “I don’t look for other people much, really . . . All the things that come outside of the music are out of my control. It’s the beast we deal with or choose not to deal with it. But for me, I can’t say that I’ve been one for stuff that didn’t have anything to do with the music.”
He says that “Til the War is Won” is an ode to single black mothers. “My father wasn’t always around, so my mother raised me and my brother alone. A young black woman raising two boys has to be so strong. There’s so many things she told me that I wish I didn’t ignore. A man or a woman can be strong alone, but my concern is what does it do to the family unit? Because at some point the streets are taking our children.”
As for contemporary rap, his opinion isn’t very high. “I appreciate what’s out there, but there’s no one keeping me up at night,” he says. “I hear a new rap record and think it’s great, but I don’t listen to it the next week.”
One artist who did impress him, however, was Brooklyn drill rap maverick Pop Smoke, who was tragically gunned down at 20 in February last year. “We were happy to see that young king come up. He was a breath of fresh air. The drill movement in London, Chicago and New York is really exciting.” I suggest he’d sound great over a beat by east London drill producer 808Melo. “Yeah man, yeah, yeah!” he agrees excitedly.
One of the things, besides making music, that brings Nas pleasure these days is being a businessman. He has his own venture capital fund called Queensbridge Venture Partners, which has made savvy investments in internet brands such as Dropbox, Lyft and Genius. When I say that he seems to enjoy being the silent partner, pulling the strings without being visible publicly, he says simply: “That’s a fact.”
Back when he was hunched up in a tiny single bedroom, headphones cranked up to block out the chaos outside, Nas envied the polish of Wall Street bankers and wondered why young black kids from his neighbourhood couldn’t enjoy the same privileges. I ask him if being in the boardroom has parallels with hustling in the street. “Even as a young teenager, I was a businessman, you know? My crew were corner executives. We were all school dropouts doing our best. Round the way, it didn’t make much sense if you didn’t hustle, but you could still go to jail or get killed.”
Reflecting again on how far he has come, he concludes: “I knew we were better than that and my dreams had to be bigger. I guess I like this business that I’m in now a whole lot better.”
‘King’s Disease’ is out now. The Grammy Awards are on March 14
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