Nas lost his way a bit in the nineties.
Out in 2001 Stillmatic was a triumphant attempt to regain the ground charted by his debut LP Illmatic, seven years earlier. Radio friendliness went out the window: the sound of the underground was back, with songs about politics and ghetto life.
Producers like Large Professor, DJ Premier, L.E.S., and Trackmasters stepped up; AZ, Mary J. Blige and Amerie put in strong shifts.
Premier re-organizes Peabo Bryson and Roberta Flack to deadly effect on 2nd Childhood. Both Large Profs are killers. Ether disses Jay-Z in fine style.

This is a great way into Partch, revisiting with gusto three well-known, relatively-compact works — a highly rhythmic dance piece, a cross-cutting film score, and Barstow, with HP intoning hitchhiker graffiti.

It’s Gonna Rain is a total knockout.
Steve Reich’s first official piece is spun out of a chance encounter with a Pentecostalist preacher at work in San Francisco’s Union Square Park in 1964.
“He’s talking about the flood in the Bible and Noah and the ark, and you’ve got to remember the Cuban missile crisis was in ‘62, and this was something hanging over everyone’s head ... that we could be so much radioactive dust in the next day or two. So this seemed very appropriate…. There are two loops of his voice, starting in unison. And then one slowly creeps ahead of the other — I just did it with my thumb on the recording reel of one of the machines. And so they go out of phase. It’s like a canon or a round, like Row, Row, Row Your Boat. And you get first a kind of shaking, a reverberation, and then you get a sort of imitation and gradually you begin to hear it as a round. And that’s exactly what happens in this piece.”
Apocalyptic, riveting, banging, urgent, game-changing… it’s killer.

Multi-layered, expansive, reflective, feelingly political, musically expert. Dev Hynes, Kelani and How To Dress Well all in the mix; Q-Tip, Tweet, Lil Wayne… and old man Knowles, most tellingly of all. Knockout singing.

Including a disinterment of his great song Burial.
‘What a big disgrace, the way you rob up the place… everything you can find, you even rob the blind. Now we know the truth… taking people’s business on your head, might as well you be dead.’
The second LP contains the dubs.