Show Preview & Giveaway: Nas @ Emo's Sunday Night

For a week this year, Nas had the number one album in the country, and of the thirty-or-so artists to hold that honor, he’s the only one who can’t perform his album in concert. At least not in its entirety, or anything approaching that – grown men would cry, tickets would be refunded, riots could ensue. Such is the curse of rapping your best rhyme in your teens and releasing your best (and, very arguably, rap’s greatest) album two weeks after Kurt Cobain killed himself.

A quick one-over of most any Nas review will tell you that everything since 1994’s Illmatic has been too bombastic or hackneyed or deliberate to ever approach that album’s enigmatic greatness. This is true. If Illmatic was essentially Greatest Hits Vol. 1, even the songs on the hypothetical second volume – “Rewind,” “The Message,” the best of the rest of his still impressive career – would pale to those ten tracks.

Nas will put on two good shows on Sunday, and that means favoring his first album over his last eight, almost as if it were a contract. You go to a Stones show to hear “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” not “Rough Justice.” You go to a Nas show to hear “NY State of Mind” – and you will. If you see Nas’s situation as tragic (and for $30 a ticket, that’s a reach), the irony is that he can still perform these songs well. Unlike some fabled sports star who turns in two great seasons then gets injured and rides pine, Nas’s flow hasn’t slipped – he can still do justice to his virtuosic moments from his past, he just struggles to repeat them. And lest this become a county fair-esque singing wax museum, Nas brings along a seasoned crowd-rocker DJ, Talib Kweli, and Jay “almost Nas back in the day” Electronica to serve as a proper foil.

Follow the jump for a chance to win a pair of tickets to the early show on Sunday night.