The Lost Tapes Review

This is a compilation of songs that were not good enough to make I Am, Nastradamus and Stillmatic, which tells you exactly how strange those years were. The songs are unfinished in the sense that nobody sanded them into singles, and finished in every sense that matters: Doo Rags, No Idea's Original, Nothing Lasts Forever and Purple all run on soul loops and a rapper who sounds like he has nothing to sell. Poppa Was a Playa is the one people still quote back, a verse about a father that lands harder than anything on the albums it was excluded from.

What the reception said at the time, and has kept saying, is that the discipline of the label was the problem rather than the writing. Left alone with no hook to chase, Nas raps in long uninterrupted paragraphs, and the record has no filler because filler is what these songs were cut in favor of. The production is dated in a way the best of it wears well, and the sequencing is a folder rather than an album.

It is a B because it is a collection and it behaves like one. It is at the very top of that band, and it is the record from his second decade that the most people would defend.