New Nas album...

[THEV1LL4N]

I thought I was the only one disappointed with the new album. I loved Life Is Good - I was expecting something similar to that.

What happened to the J Dilla produced song?

 

[dilla]

I love Nas. I love Kanye. Both of their albums are garbage.

Edit: At least they didn't make double albums. I love most of Drake's albums but Scorpion is all filler. I like a couple tracks. Elevate isn't bad. But man, most of the album is instantly forgettable

I don't want to sound like a hipster or some counter-culture snob....I can't listen to hip hop anymore. I can understand my favorite artists from the 90s and 00s are now in their 40s and 50s and really can't rap about the same things they used because they don't live that life anymore. So now it's about parties and drugs and having fun spending money and it still doesn't feel right. I can't listen to Eminem anymore because it's gone from a trouble young man with a drug addiction and family issues to just straight up lunatic ramblings. I just skipped through Nas' album and it didn't sound like him. The beats, the lyrics. It felt like a new artist that sounded a bit like a rapper I knew named Nas.

One big part of hip hop was the beats and I know music engineering has changed in the last few years, let alone the last decade, two decades, etc. I just can't get behind the change in music style for these older rappers. It used to be that I could listen to shitty lyrics if the beat was good. "When you hear that" by Mobb Deep comes to mind. But now most productions sound like trash and the lyrics of hip hop, in general, are just trash.

I guess the music is evolving and it's not the same as what it was since I started listening to music in the early 00s. That's 18 years and it would be silly for me to expect it to stay the same. But I went through the past 5+ years desperately wanting to like hip hop and being as interested in it as I was 10 years ago. As interested as people on r/hiphopheads are now, following beefs and new album releases, etc. But I just can't.

I still check Spotify's new releases on Fridays to see if an artist I like released an album but isn't popular enough for them to build up hype, but the landscape just looks so different now, I just scroll past 10 or 15 new albums and get nothing. It's like going through your high school's yearbook today and not recognizing all these people but the concept of "your high school" is still in your head. But you don't know these people and they all look different from what high school was like for you.

So it made walking away from hip hop pretty easy. Maybe not walking away but not stressing about not finding new music weekly, like I used to.

 

[THEV1LL4N]

What did people think of "Book of Ryan"?

 

[tHuG $TyLe]

I couldn't stomach going through a single track of the album. Which is crazy as he's in my top 5 of all time, yet this album just didn't hit me at all.

 

[Jokerman]

It's more like half an album--with 7 songs. The production sucks. No energy at all and totally empty. The best for me is "Adam and Eve," which I could listen to a few times again. The rest, nah.

 

[FroDawgg]

He's announced a new one, an album that he's been working on for a while, with production from Swizz and RZA. I'm sure it'll wash the bad taste of Nasir out of the mouths for anyone who didn't like it. I personally did, so I'm looking at it as a warm-up to the full-length drop. Hopefully it comes sooner than later (not after another two years).

 

[Rukas]

He should have released it straight away and capitalised off the Kanye hype.

At this point; I’ll believe it when I see it. I also think Nas has lost it to be honest so I don’t think it’ll be good regardless of who produces it.