The Nas album and C3 are the two major releases of the year thus far. When the T.I. album drops we'll be comparing that to both of these (and All Eyez on Me, no doubt). These are the premier MCs of 2008, of course they're going to be held up next to each other. I bet you think comparing Derrick Rose and Michael Beasley is stupid, too.
And lol at saying the albums can't be compared because C3 "isn't a great album or anything more." That's your opinion, Saeed al-Sahaf, and anyway, according to his apologists Nas will never make another Illmatic and it's unfair/unrealistic to expect him to so we might as well compare one non-great album to another non-great. Right?
Nas's album is full of middling beats that act as metronomes for him but really don't do anything else. To be fair, there are a couple of good ones. His flow has regressed - I don't see how anyone could argue this, unless it's been this bad for the past couple of albums and I never noticed because, you know, I'm too scared of the truth to digest Nas's science. He does have a couple of good lyrical outings here and there, but that's nothing new - he always drops enough to keep his rep alive and let his fanbase overlook the rest of the half-hearted, half-thought out rambling nonsense he's spewing - which really only bothers me, as someone who loves nonsense, because people take it seriously (I wish he'd just become a Five Percenter or some shit). Nas's raps on an average day are somewhere between dead prez and the Game with the celebrity name-dropping replaced with black history references and citations from whatever alternative news blog he discovered when he googled it after his fifth blunt one day. Even at his best, like, say, "Sly Fox", he can't stick to a topic or make a coherent verse crafted around one point - is is about propaganda or Big Brother? What the fuck does Youtube have to do with anything? Nas = that smart dumb guy Katt Williams talks about in that one sketch. Vague militant and anti-establishment rhetoric mixed with weak black power sentiments = Nas in 2008, but the worst thing is that it seems like he made the album in a black hole. Especially in today's moment, Nas could've made an album that really resonates, but the best he could do to make it fit the here and now was a 2Pac sample and some no-name motherfucker straining "Yes we can" like's he's trying to coach last night's enchiladas through his intestines. This album could've dropped in any of the past five years and it would never have felt entirely right. It's a weird sort of anachronism.
On the other hand, Lil' Wayne, a very different kind of rapper, dropped a very different album. Whereas Nas's weed habit has left him a relatively incoherent, burned-out militant, Weezy's drug abuse turned him into the most lovable kind of crackhead rock star - the kind who enjoys making music, lots of music, and recognizes the existence of an audience. He has a very different kind of interaction with his beats than Nas does - he plays with them, submits himself to them, or takes over, but never mutes them for the sake of his rapping or vice versa. His delivery is impeccable right now - no one would've rapped over "A Milli" had he not shown the way, and look what happened once he did. He's a southern rapper who took Kanye West, Alchemist, and Just Blaze beats and made them fit his sound, not the other way around. Let me expound on that further - he took ALL the beats and made them his own. When T.I. made "Rubberband Man" it sounded like T.I. rapping over a David Banner beat. When Lil' Wayne raps over two David Banner beats on this album, they sound like Lil' Wayne songs. And he does this without submerging or muting the beats the way Nas has to in order to rise over them. As far as rapping goes, it pretty much is Lil' Wayne's stream of conscious freestyling around loose concepts for 77 minutes but he flows so well and doesn't present any delusions about doing more or airs of self-importance. He's just on some MC shit. When he does *attempt* to go a little deeper he keeps his syntax and subject matter firmly in the sphere of his familiarity and what's in front of him and doesn't try to make any clumsy connections to suggest something larger and grander. It's much more humanistic and relatable.
Those are just my opinions on the albums, though. If you look at things as objectively, CIII still wins out. This shit is omnipresent the way Young Jeezy's and 50 Cent's debuts were and realistically speaking those are the classic albums of our time. Plus, the shit sold a million copies on one week. Let me rework that: It sold a million copies in one week and people are listening to ALL of it, not a million copies in one week so people could listen to the one hit song (a la Vanilla Ice, MC Hammer, Soulja Boy, etc.). I've heard songs from it on the radio, other songs (that haven't been released as singles) in the club, other songs banging out of people's cars in the street, and that still leaves a couple of quality songs that I can bump at home. There are multiple modes of listening to this album and multiple demographics to fill and it meets all of them. *Everyone* listens to it from hardcore heads to their 14 year old sisters. It's been branded into the collective memory and consciousness. I'd like to see Nas do that, and any Nas fan who claims he doesn't is a dishonest liar and selfish for not wanting his hero's intelligent polemic and uplifting battle-cry to spread to the masses.