Nas: Life Is Good (2012)

(Def Jam)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Purely musically, there's no doubt this is Nas' best album in well over a decade. With varied, capable production handled in bulk by No I.D. and Salaam Remi (on separate tracks), it employs a robust R&B sound that seems deliberately backward, yet fresh in its playful applications. It's in his lyrical themes, however, that Life Is Good comes across as the most consistent (and least self-conscious) LP the great rapper has put together since It Was Written in 1996. That's not to say that Nas has reined in his more unsavory mannerisms; there's sexism, bitterness, and bare anger that's all unbecoming years after the fadeout of Illmatic's goodwill. What's striking is the messiness; Nas keeps comparing this to Marvin Gaye's Here, My Dear, and he's right in many respects. The rants and raves that occupy Life Is Good -- an ironic title, of course -- are meant to piss you off, to make you shake your head and try to psychoanalyze the dude. But there's just enough of an abstraction here to make this a successful examination of a broken human both living in and trying to escape the past.

Like Gaye, Nas has recently (at the beginning of this decade) gone through a divorce, his from high-profile recording artist Kelis, hence the "I hate you so much right now" jab. But Gaye's divorce album was uncomfortable and difficult by design, and its devastating emotional effect will never come easily to a lesser artist, and putting yourself in the shadow of an artist like Gaye, even if you were once potentially one of your generation's greatest MCs, doesn't make for a great starting position. Thus, it's handy that this isn't strictly a lovelorn song cycle. It's more of a snapshot of an inner world at a specific moment in time. What's clearest of all is how much Nas cares about this music; there are some artists, like Alex Chilton, whose boredom produces immaculate beauty. Nas has never been such a figure; his material lives or dies by his engagement with it, and while he's never released an embarrassing album, his work has been reliably hit and miss for, now, most of his career.

There are shades of that apathetic version of Nas here. An obnoxious singalong like "Summer on Smash" just doesn't really belong on the same slab of wax as most of this material. And the clumsy half-heartedness of the family-man shit "Daughters" creepily recalls his most faux-inspirational material from the early 2000s, all diluted and radio-safe. Commercial aspirations are, of course, the pleasure and undoing of Life Is Good at its extremes, but unlike Here, My Dear, it achieves populism without sacrificing the anguish at its core. The intelligence and craft within the grandiose "A Queens Story," high drama with a hint of Gene Kelly sentimentality, is hard to fault artistically or commercially. The furious rhyming over these perfect melodramatic hooks with all their towering, revolving strings and piano are as rousing as the resignation of already-legendary closing breakup manifesto "Bye Baby" is wounding. Meanwhile, he's fun again; listen to the tricky Rufus Thomas analogue-thorny beat on "Loco-Motive" -- there's liveliness here.

Such a rediscovery of energy may not warrant the overjoyed reception that this has been afforded, but how many other rappers have even tried to cope with middle age so head-on and nakedly? The memories of Biggie and arena-rock mannerisms of "No Introduction" might paint Nas as a figure from another era, but you can't say he sounds out of touch. Indeed, the new adaptability he shows is impressive -- Heavy D's weird, over-the-top Kanye-styled club production on "The Don" is approached with delicious nonchalance on Nas' part, as though he walks in, looks around approvingly, says a few words, drops the mic and leaves.

In the past, many of us have come away disappointed at such moments. After all, Nas is at his best when exploiting the percussive potential in his tonguetwisting verbal assaults; at the peak of each of his major albums, and during the bulk of Illmatic there are these moments wherein he goes off in rapid-fire mode and you simply must throw your head back and get thoroughly swayed back and forth, as though there were something cosmic or religious about it. It's been a while since that happened, so when it does, on "You Wouldn't Understand" -- an astoundingly smooth late-'80s R&B groove that fades much too quickly -- and "World's an Addiction," it justifies the leaner, subtler moments. The latter cut is particularly interesting as it initially seems to stop the record in its tracks with its plodding urban-sprawl soul and Anthony Hamilton's initial stark, wheezy shouting. But get to the verse that begins with the attention-grabbing character study "Doctor busy operating on a lady who's sedated / He can barely concentrate cause he’s newly separated" and witness the most passion Nas has spewed out since Illmatic on his brief but well-told tale of a man coming apart.

Of course, it's a short trip from that story's punchline about premeditated murder to a conclusion that we're hearing the musical meltdown of a certifiable asshole, and many of Nas' public behaviors, those having to do with Kelis and otherwise, may bear this out. But at least the album's honest and blatant in its raw self-examination, malicious as it may sometimes be (check album cover for guest appearance by Kelis' wedding dress). That again harks back to the moral conflicts of Here, My Dear, as befitting the classicist soul influences throughout this album. The high-energy disco moves on "Reach Out" are more Midnight Love or "Got to Give It Up" than anything, though, and handily illustrate a damaged soul's willingness to change. Such unhesitant dance music -- pop, even -- is a stretch for Nas. That's undoubtedly the point.

That vitality is the needed context for the revelations Nas offers when he's back in a world he understands. "Accident Murderers" makes so much more sense in said context than it did as a single earlier in the year because it's a reasonable, well-paced outlier; even its Rick Ross guest spot is engaging. The compressed lite-jazz sound of "Stay" and surprisingly killer Amy Winehouse sample on "Cherry Wine" are suggestive of heavy, deep dreams of something transformative. In this respect, Life Is Good fails -- but it's a remarkable, artistically exuberant failure of rare dimension. Nas will never be as tight as he once was, none of us will be, but there's a new appeal to his looseness and untidiness here. It works just like that strange Motown / cued-up old-school fusion on "Back When": it's a reflection, a pause to ponder in the wake of a change and in the grip of an uncertain future. Don't they call that the blues?