New Nas video: Wow.

More of a short film, really, soundtracked by "Y'all My Niggas" from his new untitled album, which I've yet to hear in its entirety. Nasir riffs on the ramifications of that infamous word he almost titled the album before sampling Master of missing the point Bill O'Reilly and closing things out with a screed expanding the boundaries of oppression.
This underlines how frustrating it can be to be a Nas fan: He'll drop something amazing like this, but his output is so uneven after a Shakespeare-level debut at age 20. I've been listening to his second album It Was Written in the car lately and the lyrics are still there, but outside of a few bangers, the production leaves you flat. Bangers i.e. the Lauryn Hill-assisted "If I Ruled the World":

Nasty is flirting with the Puff Daddy Times Squarification of hip-hop in the video, which became insufferable but was pretty fresh in 1996, and his lyrics, while touching on materialism (like you wouldn't have some jet skis if you ran the world), got a discussion of prison abolition on mainstream radio, just as he'll hopefully do now with an honest dialogue on race and class. Thanks Nas. (Thanks also to Sound Verite')