New Nas Cd Is Evidence That Rap Is Still Flourishing

Anyone suggesting rap is in a commercial or creative tailspin should check out the Billboard album charts.

Opening last week at No. 1: Nas’s “It Was Written,” the second album by the young Queensbridge, N.Y., phenomenon whose lyrics and flow may prove the most influential of the ‘90s. Though his 1994 debut, “Illmatic,” eventually sold a million copies, Nas has had a primarily underground following. First-week sales of 270,000 copies suggest he’s about to slip into the mainstream.

Overall, last week rap occupied six of the Top 15 spots on the Billboard album charts, with the multi-platinum Fugees at No. 4, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony at No. 6, the hip-hop dominated soundtrack to “The Nutty Professor” at No. 10, Crucial Conflict’s debut opening at No. 12 and De La Soul’s latest opening at No. 13. Of these acts, only Bone Thugs-N-Harmony comes close to gangsta rap; otherwise, fresh, smart and socially conscious rap rules - and the fourth album by A Tribe Called Quest is due in two weeks.

It probably doesn’t hurt that the first single from “It Was Written” (Columbia) is an update of Kurtis Blow’s 10-year-old rap standard, “If I Ruled the World (Imagine That),” or that Nas is supported by the feathery vocals of the Fugees’ Lauryn Hill as the track juxtaposes the harsh realities of street life with a practical Utopian future. Though he never minces harsh words, Nas often expresses compassion and empathy with other people’s struggles, as on “Black Girl Lost” and “Street Dreams.” On the latter, he plays off the 1983 Eurythmics hit “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” and the fact that “everybody’s looking for something.” But in his tale of a drug runner, Nas illuminates the options, compromises and costs of chasing dreams in a ghetto.

Over 14 tracks, Nas raps with an enviable consistency over generally supple, sometimes insistent production.