Nas - It Was Written Review

The production split the fanbase before anyone heard a verse. Trackmasters handled ten of the fourteen main tracks, smoothing the jazz loops and basement grime of Illmatic into funk grooves and R&B hooks built for car systems and mixshows. The sound was closer to G-funk than boom bap, relying on sampled basslines and polished drums that left space for choruses designed to stick. DJ Premier contributed one track, where falling piano notes and stuttering drums create a noir that belongs to a different album. Dr. Dre brought West Coast funk to one feature. Havoc of Mobb Deep produced two tracks with the bleak percussion that defined mid-90s New York street rap. The album sounds expensive in a way Illmatic deliberately did not, and that was the point.

Nas writes better here than the consensus allows. The opener begins with a body in the hallway and builds a war report where every image cuts: the blood, the guns, the retaliation. The gun perspective track narrates from the perspective of a weapon and turns the gangsta rap prop into a tragic character. The revenge plot is mapped with the clarity of a screenplay. The posse cut puts Nas, AZ, Foxy Brown and Cormega on a heist track with mob-movie strings and lets each rapper claim a verse. The writing on those songs is as specific and layered as anything on the debut. The difference is the persona. Nas Escobar is a character, not a reporter, and the mafioso fantasy distances him from the Queensbridge realism that made Illmatic urgent. When the fantasy works, it gives Nas room to imagine power instead of documenting powerlessness. When it does not, it reads like dress-up.

The album's reach for mainstream success produces its most obvious flaws. The Lauryn Hill collaboration pairs them over a Whodini sample and builds a utopian fantasy that is moving in concept and awkward in execution: the idealism does not fit the album's cold pragmatism. One track addresses the struggle of Black women with real empathy but leans too hard on Joel Hailey's R&B crooning. The Eurythmics interpolation builds a cautionary tale about drug money and works as a single but feels calculated. The sequencing does not help. The album peaks early, sags in the middle, and ends with a second version that adds nothing. At seventy-one minutes, the album is ten minutes too long and three songs too many.

The album front-loads its strongest material and never recovers the momentum. The opening track sets the tone with a verse that feels like a Scorsese tracking shot, all blood and consequence. By the sixth track, the album has already spent its best ideas. The middle stretch holds the line with strong posse cuts and narrative songs, but two tracks break the mafioso thread without replacing it with anything sharper. The utopian anthem is a great song in the wrong album, clashing with the cynicism surrounding it.

The back half collapses into filler. Two late-album tracks are competent but forgettable. The cassette version and the bonus verse on the expanded edition feel like outtakes included to pad the runtime. The album needed to end earlier or cut four tracks and tighten the arc. What remains is a record that announces its thesis in the first twenty minutes and spends the next fifty struggling to sustain it.

It Was Written ranks third in the Nas catalog behind Illmatic and Stillmatic, ahead of everything else. It is the sound of a great rapper learning to work at scale without losing his pen, and the proof that the move toward the mainstream was not a sellout but a calculated risk that mostly paid off. The weakest songs here are better than the worst moments on I Am… or Street's Disciple, and the peaks are high enough to justify the album's reputation as a classic in its own right. Illmatic is the better album by every measure that matters to purists. It Was Written is the one that made Nas a star and built the mafioso lane for a generation of rappers who followed.

The album works best for listeners who do not need every Nas project to be Illmatic and who can appreciate sharp writing in a shinier package. It does not work for anyone allergic to R&B hooks or anyone looking for the raw urgency of the debut. Start with "The Message," "I Gave You Power" and "Affirmative Action." Skip "Suspect" and the second "Street Dreams." If those three tracks prove that Nas can write at this level with Trackmasters behind him, run the full album and decide whether the filler is worth the peaks. If you want more mafioso concept work, play Raekwon's Only Built 4 Cuban Linx next; if you want Nas at his hungriest again, jump to Stillmatic. It Was Written is not the album that defines Nas, but it is the one that proved he could define more than one sound.