Despite working with a more modern crop of collaborators recently, it seems Nas hasn’t completely shaken his old-head views. Nas recently collaborated with some of today’s rappers, including Big Sean, Don Toliver, and Lil Durk, on his 2020 album King’s Disease, but that didn’t stop him from sharing his frankly unsurprising opinion with Financial Times during an interview discussing his impressive investment portfolio.
“I appreciate what’s out there, but there’s no one keeping me up at night,” he told the magazine. “I hear a new rap record and think it’s great, but I don’t listen to it the next week.” I guess Hit-Boy was the one making sure Nas stayed up-to-date on his new album.
Hip-hop’s generation gap is a well-worn topic for the Queensbridge veteran. While his outlook today is a far cry from “hip-hop is dead,” the sentiment after which he titled his eighth album in 2016, it seems that this attitude is born more of low awareness than an actual problem with hip-hop. For instance, it seems his attention seems pretty focused on New York — he name-checks Pop Smoke as one rapper who impressed him.
“We were happy to see that young king come up,” he says of the slain Brooklyn rapper, who will make his posthumous acting debut this Friday in Eddie Huang’s basketball movie Boogie. “He was a breath of fresh air.”
You can read the full interview here and learn more about modern hip-hop — of which there is plenty of great, memorable stuff being done — here.