On his masterpiece coming-of-age in 1994 Illmatical, Nas recounted the expansive Queensbridge houses, and the thrills and despair of the young Black life in New York City during the Dinkins era, with the detail and scale of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. He never came close to making another Illmatical, but he still won 26 years later the rich source material of the album.
The highlights on King’s disease, Nas’ first full-length album since 2012, are the songs as he revisits his formative experiences in the late Eighties and early to mid-nineties. Snapshots of those teens still come easily to him, and his bright story unspools tell vignettes in fourth verse. The opening rules of “Blue Benz” remind the iconic opening scene in Liif: “I was once at the Tunnel, 20 deep in a huddle / Razors on us that will bubble the skin, Must, we gossip / Chris Lighty let me in a few times with nine in.” On “Auto 85,” the car service favored by Nas’ generation of hustlers inspires a summer hike across the hill route: “That’s NY, White Castle at midnight / fish sandwich, 40-ounces and fistfights.” Hit-Boy’s production on the album, which weaves faint hazy horns, filtered soul samples, muted drums, and lots of piano, is a particularly apt backdrop in these moments of nostalgic reverence.
Nas’ Black pride and righteous anger, which animate a lot King’s Disease, most resonate as he draws a line between his present and pre-famous past. By touching on the infamous 1994 crime bill that dismisses young black men as “super-predators”, it cannot repair emotional trauma success (“Angle Manager Born in the Ghetto Ghetto / Where Metal Cries”), and the death of Kiing Shooter, the 27-year-old Queensbridge rapper who was signed to his label, is relegating his gloomy worldview to George Floyd. De Duvel’s lasso is a flat circle.
King’s disease sometimes acts as a Nas advice column, and the clogs of OG wisdom he seeks to issue vary wildly in quality. For every pearl there is a turd. Several turds arise when Nas treats multisyllabic rhyme as a separate ending. “The dumbest part of Africa produced Blacks who started algebra,” he says of the title track. At “10 points”, the impulse to “street guys” advises him in faint grass: “get a lawyer, read your contract and eat food. ”
The biggest and most immovable turd of all is Nas’ little misogyny. While he spends a lot King’s disease handing out name checks for men of all stripes – billionaires, record sexists, dancehall pioneers, basketball players, the Beatles, his boxing coach, his boys – he spends as much time as women wanting to stay in their place. He takes a cheap shot at Doja Cat, a woman he may or may not like. His anger escalates to “The Definition” when he arrives on the subject of Gayle King, the TV journalist who brought up the rape allegations of Kobe Bryant on the day of his death. “Replace Me” and “All Bad,” generic reflections on failed novels, appear as calculated additions to the tracklist designed to show that he had “normal” relationships, in light of accusations of domestic abuse that his ex-wife Kelis against sent him out in 2018.
Nas vehemently denied Kelis ‘accusations, such as those of his ex Carmen Bryan, who wrote about their relationship in 2006: “The next thing I knew I was hit in the face with a closed fist. The impact of’ the blow was so hard that I saw stars. ‘ Op King’s disease, he doubles these denials and promotes a bizarre feeling for male victim. Less than a minute after the album, he goes on to cancel out the culture and is directed at Kelis, who he believes fabricated despite their stories of abuse. On “Til the War Is Won”, a performative tribute to black women, he denies “cowardly men who hit you”, then mumbles as a sidekick: “Never me.” Whether Nas is protesting too much for debate; however, he clearly feels sorry for himself. He also apparently does not see the irony of claiming that some women want to “sag” him.
At its best, King’s disease is a smooth Illmatical redux, a fresh portrait of Nas’ now mythical hustler years that expands his Queensbridge universe with new characters and anecdotes and finds him in vintage form as a rapper and narrator. At the very least, it is a misguided attempt to paper allegations of abuse and a stark showcase of his increasingly dubious policies when it comes to women. 26 years after Illmatical, Nas still has room to grow.
