I Am... Review

The original plan is a two disc life story. Most of it leaks before release, the plan is scrapped, and what reaches shelves is a salvage job with the seams showing. The salvaged material is excellent. Nas Is Like takes a chopped vocal from his own debut and turns it into the most quotable single of his career. N.Y. State of Mind Pt. II earns the title rather than trading on it. Small World and Undying Love are the autobiography that was promised, one of them a patient piece of writing about how little distance there is between people, the other a murder ballad that goes somewhere genuinely ugly.

Then the replacements arrive. Hate Me Now is a stadium sized complaint about fame with a chorus that was old the day it shipped. You Won't See Me Tonight bolts an unlikely guest chorus onto a beat from a producer who is doing better work for other people that year. The gloss on those tracks is not the problem. The problem is that they exist to hit a running time. Every strong song here points at an album that got stolen, and it is hard to listen without doing the arithmetic on what was lost.