Nas’ ‘King’s Disease’ Gets Derailed by Petty Misogyny

The Queensbridge icon’s legendary storytelling chops are undercut by his increasingly bad politics on his first album in eight years

On his 1994 coming-of-age masterpiece Illmatic, Nas rendered the sprawling Queensbridge Houses, and the thrills and despair of young Black life in Dinkins-era New York City, with the detail and scale of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. He’s never come close to making another Illmatic, but he’s still mining the album’s rich source material 26 years later.

The high points on King’s Disease, Nas’s first full-length album since 2012, are the songs when he revisits his formative experiences in the late Eighties and early to mid Nineties. Snapshots from those teenage years still come to him easily, and his lucid storytelling unspools in quarter-verse vignettes. The opening lines of “Blue Benz” recall the iconic opening scene in Belly: “I used to be at the Tunnel, 20 deep in a huddle/Razors on us that’ll make skin bubble, Moet, we guzzle/Chris Lighty let me in a few times with nines.” On “Car 85,” the car service preferred by hustlers of Nas’s generation inspires a summertime cruise down memory lane: “That’s NY, White Castle at midnight/ Fish sandwiches, 40-ounces, and fistfights.” Hit-Boy’s production on the album, which deftly weaves hazy horns, filtered soul samples, muted drums, and lots of piano, is a particularly apt backdrop during these moments of nostalgic reverie.