Nas - It Was Written (Expanded Edition)

You could make a pretty great album from the wealth of Nas songs that were once relegated to mixtape cuts or released only as white labels. And that's exactly what Nas did-twice, in fact-assembling some of his most revered loosies for The Lost Tapes volumes 1 and 2. For the 25th anniversary of his sophomore album It Was Written, however, Nasty Nas asks if he can make an already great album even greater with the addition of the originally cassette-only bonus track “Silent Murder” and a version of “Street Dreams” with an extra, particularly braggadocious verse. Injecting new energy into a project as storied as It Was Written is no small task-the album contains multiple songs that are not only essential to Nas’ catalogue, but that are also hip-hop canon (“The Message”, “Street Dreams”, “If I Ruled the World [Imagine That]”). But that’s also why it doesn’t take much to get true hip-hop fans to dive in to an all-time classic. It’s almost just as simple as reminding them it exists.