Sarah McLachlan kicked off Random Weekends 19 months (and 597 songs) ago, but she hasn’t shown up since until today. Fountains of Wayne don’t know how good they’ve got it.
This is actually the tenth Sarah McLachlan song to make the blog, though, which is more than I would have guessed for an artist who left my good graces two albums, and ten years, ago.
Here’s my final Nas track of the week (and probably on the blog, period, given how unimpressed I’ve been with his work). Like yesterday’s SOTD, this one comes from his Stillmatic LP.
I haven’t listened to it yet, but I’ve read that it features a sample of Phil Collins’ ‘In the Air Tonight,’ which is promising. Funny how a great sample can make a song work in an entirely new way. Think of the way Dido’s ‘Thank You’ goes from a sweet bauble to something ominous and sad in Eminem’s ‘Stan.’
Jumping ahead five years to 2001, we arrive at the Nas album Stillmatic and the song ‘Ether,’ a take-down of our old friend Jay-Z.
Nas’s previous two albums had been poorly received, so Stillmatic was a comeback record, its title calling back to his celebrated debut. This track was a response to a cut on Jay-Z’s album The Blueprint in which he dismissed Nas as an also-ran.
Nas’s sophomore album, It Was Written, is described by Wikipedia as more “polished” and “mainstream” than its predecessor.
Those might sound like bad words to most indie or rap music fans, but I see it as a sign of hope. Polish is exactly what the first two songs I featured this week were lacking.
Today’s track is a duet with Lauryn Hill, another fact that has me excited. The song was recorded in 1994, when Hill was starting out with The Fugees, three years before her acclaimed Miseducation.
My second Nas track also comes from his debut album, Illmatic, and it’s the one song that showed up on all five of the “Best Nas Songs” websites I looked at to generate this week’s song list.
So according to my very unscientific poll, I should expect this to be the very best Nas song of all. Talk about pressure.
