For the first 20 years of his career, each Nas album was not only a major event, but a departure from or escalation of what came before. This changed in 2020, when he locked into a steady rhythm with Hit-Boy, the producer from Southern California’s Inland Empire who seemed, at the beginning of the 2010s, like he might shape the decade in rap (he produced JAY-Z and Kanye West’s “Niggas in Paris,” A$AP Rocky’s “Goldie,” and Kendrick Lamar’s “Backseat Freestyle” in a little over a calendar year), only to retreat into the quasi-anonymity of expensive pop projects. Since then, he and Nas have been on an unwavering schedule, arriving once a year to drop music that has to this point hovered just above “competent,” a master artist with a workmanlike producer doing earnest work for hire. Their most recent installment, somewhat ironically, was called Magic.
King’s Disease III, which is almost twice as long as Magic, is the first argument in favor of this deliberate demystification. Nas’ chief concerns (Queensbridge circa 1988, the corrosive effects of violence, upward social mobility for Black Americans, and banal luxury) are the kind that come into sharper focus with each variation on minor variation. And a rush of new albums frees each from the albatross of his legacy, which he no longer feels the need to litigate to the lengths he once did. KD3 is steeped in nostalgia but not besotted with it; it is routine, and all the better for it, loose and expert and finally nimble again.
With this newfound looseness comes a more direct mode of writing and delivery. Nas verses were once like cobwebs, seeming to stretch in every direction at once, phonetically and topically, until isolating the individual threads became impossible—and beside the point. Songs like 2001’s “Rewind,” where a pulp crime vignette, including its lines of dialogue, is told in reverse, are actually easier to digest on first pass than many of the denser, knottier ones from his first several albums. As late as 2012’s “Nasty,” he was staking his albums on ostentatious displays of raw technique. Here he seems to stride atop Hit-Boy’s beats where he once would have scurried back and forth through a network of tunnels he’d dug beneath them. On “WTF SMH,” he makes nearly every point—about Big Daddy Kane’s influence and how profitable his publishing has been for MC Serch, about “cowards” who “cut the tough guy shit”—land with percussive single-syllable bursts.
