It is an improvement on its predecessor, but is too often stuck in a dull, permanent present, a hollow corporatespeak bleeding into Nas’s once-unmistakable syntax. King’s Disease II, which again pairs Nas with Hit-Boy, is intermittently fascinating as a vehicle for the rapper to indulge his long-held fascinations or correct the historical record. Though staid by Nas’s standard, King’s Disease earned him a statuette for Best Rap Album, his first Grammy win on his 14th nomination. It was the first time he sounded like a legacy act. That record finds him firmly in the pocket - not only in the way his vocals nestle comfortably in Hit-Boy’s beats, but by its songwriting landing squarely in Nas’s comfort zone. But it was poorly received, and he corrected course quickly, enlisting the producer Hit-Boy for last year’s King’s Disease. Nasir is unsuccessful on virtually every level, though its strangeness suggests more interesting songs beneath the ones West and Def Jam rushed out: His flows are stilted and at points verge on spoken word, he nibbles around the edges of beats. When he returned, it was with Nasir, one of those seven-song dispatches from Kanye West’s Wyoming sessions. Nas did not release an album for six years following Life Is Good. (Its unexpectedly warm ode to the marriage is now colored by allegations of the rapper’s abusive behavior, allegations Nas denies.)

In truth, Life Is Good’s best moments are technical exercises or those time-collapsing remembrances. It was framed by Nas’s divorce from the singer Kelis, whose wedding dress is draped across his lap on the cover. That LP, which won almost universal acclaim, was sometimes cited as the first major rap album to effectively grapple with middle age. Some critics might argue that 2012’s Life Is Good is an exception to this rule.

This indifference to the normal aging process feels appropriate for someone who’s looked 25 since Pac was alive. But at his best, Nas has always collapsed age and time in a fugue of shocking detail. This is not to mischaracterize his early work as flatly philosophical - from the beginning, he kept razors under his tongue and Uzis in his winter coats - or to overstate the success of his late-period albums, which can feel obligatory, xeroxes of xeroxes spit out at three-quarter speed. When he was barely out of his teens, he was rapping with a convincing weariness about the things he’d seen, lived, weathered now, closing in on 50, his music is dotted with vignettes from Koch-era New York so vivid they might as well be in the present tense. Taken as a whole, Nas’s catalog plays something like a Möbius strip.

Nas hate me now classical music