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Nas has made a passionate album to reawaken your love of the art and if your heart isn't thumping in your chest by the end then it's not hip-hop that's dead, it's you.
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It contains a smart, tight, cohesive analysis of where rap went astray, but also the seeds of the genre's rebirth and renewal.
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The fun comes easier when he fools around with the title conceit, and even sometimes when he thinks about it.
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A Dante-channeling journey through the many diverse facets of hip-hop.
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Nas's insight, erudition and poetic intensity override all other concerns.
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MojoIt is Nas's poetic erudition that makes it a stone cold classic. [Mar 2007, p.100]
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Hip-Hop Is Dead... brings out the best in the emcee, who might have produced his strongest lyrical performance since Illmatic.
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Here’s the thing about Nas’s old-fashioned approach to hip-hop: It still works.
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VibeDisorienting and sometimes brilliant. [Jan 2007, p.109]
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Nas pushes lyricism and technical virtuosity to the forefront here, stretching both his own boundaries and those around him.
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You don't have to agree with the prognosis (even Nas has a change of heart by the end) to relish the furious eloquence with which it's delivered.
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Nas has always sounded older than his years, but there are moments on his eighth album when he sounds like the lead in the hood version of Grumpy Old Men.
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More than Illmatic, it represents the real Nas-- not the ideal-- the MC with all the skill, all the rhymes, and all the insight who sabotaged himself with bad decisions.
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Hip Hop Is Dead is a lot like Nas himself: impossible not to admire, but hard to love.
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Like many of his previous efforts, lyrically and conceptually, it's second-to-none. But musically and in terms of execution, it doesn't always hit the mark.
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Hip Hop Is Dead is not Illmatic.
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"Hip Hop Is Dead" feels bloated and a little self-indulgent at 16 songs, not all of which are as essential as the first few, but that doesn't change the legitimacy of the point Nas is trying to make, or the guts he shows in making it.
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A few flashes of brilliance, but no sustained heat.
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BlenderNas can still dazzle on the mic. [Jan/Feb 2007, p.87]
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Nas caps a year of NYC-based disappointments with quite possibly the most crushing one yet.
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Hip Hop Is Dead’s fruitless and one-dimensional rhetoric is sure to depress the Nas fan more than any of his didactics.
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With Dr. Dre, Kanye West, and even Jay-Z on its guest list, Hip Hop Is Dead makes for an ample, yet ultimately morbid, party.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 154 out of 175
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Mixed: 9 out of 175
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Negative: 12 out of 175
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Aug 4, 2023such a mess of a album. after illmatic this man was finisheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeed
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Dec 6, 2022
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Dec 1, 2022