He produces five of 14 tracks on Life is Good, and they all exude the warm TV-fireplace crackle of the best throwback production. seems to be cementing his role as the Rap Whisperer: He recently guided a deeply confused Common to his first good record in nine years, and it's likely he exercised some of the same gentle-but-firm guidance here. said that he "wanted to make a soundtrack that allowed Nas to be Nas." Mentor to Kanye, a Chicago rap veteran, and the current executive vice president at Def Jam, No I.D. In the recent Complex cover story on Nas, I.D. It's also entirely possible that Nas fans have No I.D. "You screamin' at the racist cops in Miami was probably the highlight of my life," he recalls, the affection audible in his voice. The song aimed directly at Kelis ("Bye Baby"), meanwhile, is more a good-times remembrance than score-settling. "Daughters", his sweetly reflective response to the condom-gate that is no less sweet for its slight lyrical awkwardness (he refers to what is presumably Twitter just as "the social network"), finds him examining the responsibilities of fatherhood with fond bewilderment.
Historically at his best when shaken, Nas has rich material to work with here, and he's more open-hearted on Life Is Good than he has been since God's Son. The last few years have been turbulent ones in Nas' personal life - his brutally public split with Kelis, the costly settlement, the embarrassing fiasco with his teenage daughter tweeting pictures of a bejeweled box of condoms in her bedroom. Life Is Good is so consistent, in fact, that it's disorienting, and those of us with a long history navigating Nas albums will have a lot of pressing questions: What are all these top-shelf beats doing here? Where are the queasy sex jams, the songs rapped from the perspective of heroin spoons or discarded E&J bottles, the choruses about being a Warrior and a Hero? Where is the blindingly ill-fitting Nas Radio Bid? (The lone example, the Swizz Beatz-produced "Summer on Smash", is just inoffensively generic.) But above all: What happened this time? Life Is Good finds him avoiding most of his worst impulses, scraping the pseudo-mystical Righteous Teacher patina off his crown and touching back down in the Queensbridge of his sense memory over late-summer-light production. we won't go there, as comparing Nas albums is like comparing birthdays where your father showed up late instead of not at all. Song for song, it's his most solid, disaster-free album since, well. But what if Nas stopped fretting about blowing people's minds or disappointing them and just, you know, made a record? It's the kind of question Nas devotees have spent years pondering, and Life Is Good, his 10th studio album and strongest in three or four presidential administrations, is basically the answer.
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