Ill Will was gone. His brother had been shot. School wasn’t the move. He’d become the day-to-day man of the house. Nasir, at a tender age, had to make sense of an environment that had no sympathy for the weak. He had to pave a way that would somehow suit his desires — that’s what everyone wants but so few achieve — especially inside of the kind of circumstances that surrounded the young, thoughtful poet. He just knew that he had to express himself. That expression was his only real commodity. That and his will to live to show and prove. Nas also had culture. Having a jazz musician father who’d traveled the world, who had a strong sense of self and a connection to his Southern roots — this gave Nas an advantage. It didn’t make him better — just different. Nas could sell crack. He even tried. But crack wasn’t the essence of who he was. He could talk about it, though — about that and everything else that emerged when the doors to the pissy elevators opened.

“I was surrounded by animals, and I knew I was the hope for us,” Nas reflected at the tail-end of 2013. He was verbally trooping back to the time when he made Illmatic and touching on what it meant to himself and those in his circle. “That record was a young man suffocating, and suffocating around him was his friends. But I found a hole, and I grabbed a knife and dug at that hole to get air for us. And that’s what it felt like. If there wasn’t hip hop, I would’ve had no way to tell that story.

“The generation before us — they were hip hop superstars,” he continued via telephone. “It was about being fly like Heavy D — who was a hero to me. I didn’t have that — my generation didn’t have that. Because those guys who came and did it before us did it so crazy that, there was no room. The generation before fought to be included in the Grammys, fought to be on big time radio. They fought to have the kind of exposure that other music genres received. My class? We were what was left when those tour buses rode off in the sunset. We were what was left on the block.” With his words, with his sage-dripping delivery, Nas made the projects feel like a living, breathing organism. Better yet, a friend capable of both sympathetically listening to you — or slicing you in the same breath. He did it because that was all he had to work with. Nas turned whine into wine.