ego trip back issue question
mannybolone
Los Angeles, CA 15,025 Posts
I thought I had all the back issues to ego trip but I haven't been able to find a few. there was one where the mag reviewed both "It Was Written" and "Reasonable Doubt" side-by-side. I always thought that was an amazing review. Does anyone know which issue it appeared in? And who the author is? Mao?thanks,Oliver
Comments
i need more count chocula interviews in my life.
they have some of them here
Elliott Jesse Wilson was the author of that there rev.
Shit, I remember when we got the dubs of those two on the same day before the albums dropped. We listened to the whole Nas tape immediately & were so disappointed in it we didn't know what to do w/ ourselves. At the time Jay-Z wasn't even a factor; Reasonable Doubt was a complete afterthought. Days later me & Elliott are talking & it was like, 'Hey, that Jay-Z album's actually pretty good...'
Oliver, I don't remember off the top of my head which issue the review is in but just email me which ones you're missing & I'll get em to you.
Mr. Hsulu came through - it was the Ghostface cover (Issue #8 I think) and it was Elliot writing under the pseudonym "Warren Coolidge".
That's funny that the idea to review the two side-by-side was an afterthought - I found it incredibly insightful and it managed to, in a nutshell, sum up what Nas was doing wrong and predict (in hindsight) how Jay-Z was going to become K.O.N.Y.
Just curious (and this isn't just for Mao but anyone else): how many folks were disappointed by "It Was Written" but eventually "forgave" it? And how many (like me) still can't really bear to listen to it?
I'm with you in the latter camp.
I hadn't listened to it for years after my copy got stolen, but my girl found a copy amongst a bunch of CDs she'd forgotten she had, and it holds up better than I thought it might. Following a record like "Illmatic" would be a tall order for anyone, but at least a third of "It Was Written" still sounds good to me. "I Am", on the other hand...
That album--if you can somehow wipe all thoughts of Illmatic from your mind--really isn't that bad... certainly not when compared to some of the Nas projects that would follow.
It's always interesting to talk to people substantially younger than me that didn't have the experience of listening to Illmatic daily back in 94/95 and of anticipating Nas's second record. If you did have that experience, IWW felt almost like a personal betrayal, but some of these young folks don't identify with that at all and even prefer IWW.
This isn't a challenge or anything--just curiousity.
Weren't you a French eight year old when Illmatic came out?
I feel you on that. I was lucky enough to get an advance copy of "It Was Written", and I don't think I'd anticipated a rap record as much since "Fear Of A Black Planet". The decent cuts are still decent now but, with the best will in the world, I couldn't convince myself that it was anything other than a major disappointment. Nas has never been less than a great lyricist, but so many of the beats on that record, and quite a few of the subsequent ones, were way too lightweight for a lot of the subject matter.
I never reviewed "It Was Written". I did review "reasonable Doubt" years later - I think around when they reissued it. I'll have to find it somewhere - it was for ABC's Wall of Sound but they're LONG defunct.
Close...I was like in 6th or 7th grade. It was the day my brother graduated high school or something and went to some fancy restaurant in Fishermans Warf. I was mad bored so I snuck out and went to a Warehouse music which on the first floor.
I take my comment towards Batmon has filled you with glee.
I agree. The hypothetical listener I referred to who is able to momentarily forget about Illmatic when listening to IWW certainly isn't me.
In fact, I never listen to that album--I've had it out maybe once in the past half decade, and listen to his subsequent records much more frequently. I wouldn't say that any of those albums (save The Lost Tapes) are objectively better than IWW, but coming after his fall from grace, I have a less personal perspective on them. That is, I didn't approach them with particularly elevated expectations--by the time they were released, Nas was in some sense just another rapper to me: someone who will fill his albums with a few good tracks, a few bad ones and lot of unmemorable ones.
The freestyles he was putting out on mixtapes around that time had me amped though
I think my attempts to compress my "magical feelings" towards Nas into words in this thread probably merit a major PAUSE.
Whatever, fine, I don't like rap music. I really don't care.
This is not the response we are looking for.
You must challenge him to a contest of authenticity utilizing one or more of the four elementz.
I mean, I hear you but...DUDE!
Please to name albums ego trip NOT disappointed by when they heard the dub.
(Somewhere, I hear the faint sounds of MOP wafting through the air)
Now post your Reasonable Doubt review or you are soft.
Sounding a little bitter and irrelevant???, aren't we, Young R?
I'll find it. But now that I think about, I think my review was actually shaped by reading the ego trip review first. I never sat with Reasonable Doubt when it first came out Elliot's review made me go back to it a second time and really get into it.
Just to be clear here, in my book, Reasonable Doubt is a classic.
only built 4 cuban linx (ninjas)
we had to go through a lot to get these dubs - thus, maybe unrealistically heightened expectations. i remember elliott going to jive to hear 'midnight marauders', asking the publicist if it was ok to listen to it on his walkman instead of the conference room stereo, leaving the building w/ it still in his walkman, going home to queens to dub it as the publicist is calling his house looking for the cassette, going back into manhattan to return it like it was an honest mistake, then going directly to my apartment to dub it for me. espionage productions for real.
In your book, perhaps--but I'm talking about your website circa 1996.
I do remember reading a piece by you in which you lamented the lack of notable rap debuts that year, where RD was lumped in with the likes of Camp Lo.