Listening to this album a fair bit lately prompted me to try and count the number of \u201cdivorce albums\u201d there are in my personal collection. I stopped counting once I hit the big 40. It never seems to amaze me how much material songwriters seem to find when dealing with their broken hearts (and homes).\u00a0 <\/p>\n
Nas has certainly released some stellar work over the years, but his latest offering is the one that I now play the most often and in my mind it ranks as one if his best ever. Life Is Good<\/i> is album number eleven for the man, and it was born following the break-up of his marriage to Kelis and his desire to make a quick follow-up to his fantastic (comeback album of sorts) release from 2011, Distant Relatives<\/i>. <\/p>\n
The main reason I love this record so much is that lyrically speaking, it is possibly Nas\u2019 most accomplished and personal work; it ventures across almost every human emotion and also includes some great storytelling. Musically, it is a treasure-trove of classic hip-hop and contemporary R&B tracks, which creates a fitting backdrop to these killer songs and Nas\u2019 awesome performance right throughout the entire disc. <\/p>\n
It would be an impossible task to list all of the producers and guest artist who worked on this project because there are just way too many of them, but it\u2019s worth mentioning that everyone involved did great work and contributed to the overall success of this record. On stellar cuts like \u201cNo Introduction\u201d and \u201cQueens Story,\u201d we get glimpses of Nas\u2019 childhood in the hood and just how times were for him back then. Rick Ross drops in and helps bring \u201cAccidental Murderers\u201d to life as he relates a story of the all too familiar senseless gangbanging that takes out just as many \u201cinnocents\u201d as those involved. <\/p>\n
To lighten the mood somewhat, Nas delivers a heartfelt song that reflects on his life as a father of girls and it goes out as a word of warning to his \u201cbrothers with daughters.\u201d Other standouts are the smooth R&B of \u201cReach Out,\u201d which welcomes Mary J. Blige into the house, a class act who rarely ever delivers anything other than quality work. Miguel and Swizz Beatz do their thing on the cool chill-out track \u201cSummer On Smash\u201d and Victoria Monet offers a sweet vocal for the hard-luck tale of \u201cYou Wouldn\u2019t Understand.\u201d\u00a0 <\/p>\n
Deep into this fantastic album, we still get killer tracks like the old-school \u201cThe Don\u201d and the retro-styled jazz\/R&B track \u201cCherry Wine,\u201d which features a stellar vocal performance from the late Amy Winehouse. <\/p>\n
Life Is Good<\/i> is one of my favorite hip-hop albums ever, it is smart and soulful and powerfully delivered without all of the tired clich\u00e9s that most rappers just can\u2019t seem to shake.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":67,"featured_media":31744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[8693],"rating":[5613],"class_list":["post-43456","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-nas","rating-rating-a-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/43456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/67"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43456"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/43456\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43456"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=43456"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=43456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}