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Our critic\u2019s latest Song of the Week is a track by Nas with a posthumous verse by Big L, the New York M.C. who was murdered in his prime.<\/p>\nnew video loaded: What Could\u2019ve Been for My Favorite \u201990s Rapper<\/p>\n
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What Could\u2019ve Been for My Favorite \u201990s RapperOur critic\u2019s latest Song of the Week is a track by Nas with a posthumous verse by Big L, the New York M.C. who was murdered in his prime.<\/p>\n
Forgive my sincerity, but I got to talk about one of my favorite rappers of all time: Big L. There\u2019s a new Big L song that\u2019s out from a posthumous album. It\u2019s a collaboration with Nas. It\u2019s part of a project that Nas is doing with Mass Appeal Records, to bring attention to some of the crucial New York rappers of the \u201990s. So Big L was murdered in 1999. He was 24 years old. Throughout rap history, people point to Big L as sort of a master of economy and intricacy. You\u2019re never uncertain of where the corners are on a Big L verse. The way that he plots syllables is almost mathematically precise. He also is incredibly gifted when it comes to assonance. You listen to this verse. There\u2019s probably four, maybe five, different vowel sounds that he returns to over and over again that become recurrent themes throughout the verse. This song is also an interesting document that kind of exploits the tension between what once was and what could have been. You listen to Big L\u2019s verse, it feels very much like a true relic of 1997. Nas\u2018s verse is something different. It opens up with him saying, \u201cI\u2019m the first in the rap form of venture cap.\u201d Whatever you might think of that as a bar, it is notable that Nas, a rapper who comes from the same exact time period as Big L, all these decades later, a multi-, multi-, multi-, multimillionaire. Hearing him side by side with Big L, who\u2019s been gone for 25 years at this point, it\u2019s hard not to be sad and a little bit wistful about all the opportunity that was sitting just on the other side of things for Big L had he survived. Here\u2019s five more Big L classics you should check out, including the infamous \u201cStretch & Bobbito\u201d freestyle from 1995 alongside Jay-Z.<\/p>\n
Our critic\u2019s latest Song of the Week is a track by Nas with a posthumous verse by Big L, the New York M.C. who was murdered in his prime.<\/p>\n
October 29, 2025<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"new video loaded: What Could\u2019ve Been for My Favorite \u201990s Rapper transcript Back transcript What Could\u2019ve Been for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":21952,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[605,9,11,10,2866,6161],"class_list":{"0":"post-21951","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-nas","9":"tag-new-york","10":"tag-new-york-headlines","11":"tag-new-york-news","12":"tag-podcast","13":"tag-rap-and-hip-hop"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21951","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21951"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21951\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21952"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}