Nas and DJ Premier Finally Locked In for a Full Album

Any objective rap fan of a certain age approaches legacy albums like Nas and DJ Premier’s Light-Years with learned skepticism. For 30-odd years, rap was exclusively a young person’s game, defined by brief, powerful peak runs of dominance. The genre is now comfortably middle-aged, as is a large contingent within its fan base. Like old comic-book nerds before them, old rap nerds have become a class of noisy, obnoxious cultists whose buying power the culture has belatedly recognized and now caters to with price-gouged vinyl reprintings and button-up shows at prestige venues and designer-collab merch and every so often, even new music. In a country with little left to look forward to, the nostalgia market is booming.

Mass Appeal’s “Legend Has It” initiative was both aligned with rap’s fan-service era and distinct from it—seven 2025 albums bringing dormant legends out of various states of semi-retirement/convalescence to deliver albums torn from the imaginations and groupchat arguments of fans who had all but given up on their possibility. Many of those fans, accustomed to overpromised and underdelivered pipe dreams, scanned a lineup that included new material from Slick Rick, Ghostface Killah, Raekwon, De La Soul, Big L, Mobb Deep, and Nas with DJ Premier, said “Sounds great,” and began holding our breath in unison.

Mass Appeal was spun off from a graffiti magazine named after a Gang Starr song in the mid-‘90s, then revived in the early 2010s, after it was purchased by Nas and an investor group who’ve used the brand as foundation for a full-blown media company that includes a television and film production wing and a record label. During this period the outer-borough native also “decided” to amass generational wealth, moving beyond the parameters of what is possible within the rap celebrity-brand space by launching Queensbridge Ventures, a full-fledged VC firm with a portfolio that boasts a ridiculously high slugging percentage, including timely investments in Ring, Dropbox, Coinbase, SeatGeek, Lyft, and Casper Mattresses, among other timely calls. Nas is now a restaurateur (he’s an investor in Simon Kim’s restaurants Cote and Coqodaq) and recently won New York rap’s late-capitalism Super Bowl by helping bring a $5 billion casino expansion to Queens (and beating out a splashy, ambitious bid from an old foe in the process.)

So there was cause to doubt the commitment and sincerity of the “Legend Has It” series—or to fear it was little more than a now-rich guy’s vertical-integration vanity project. Now that the album cycle is complete, your mileage with the resulting albums may vary, but the commitment, the thoughtfulness, the execution can’t. Each effort got a proper rollout, live events, vinyl pressings, and budgets that allowed for star-studded features and production rosters, and each one got a verse from Nas. There was a limited-edition series of comic books starring each artist that was featured in the series; a pop-up merch shop on Howard in Tribeca is open through the holidays. It was clearly a force-for-good passion play that paid proper respect to these legends and presumably netted them a check as well as a few more well-deserved flowers on several decent-to-very good albums.

But Nas saved his best surprise for last: the long-gestating Light-Years. Nas and DJ Premier—the producing half of Gang Starr and a legend who moved from Brooklyn to Houston as a teenager in the ‘80s—have enjoyed a Kurosawa-Mifune-level creative partnership that’s defined several decades of a particular brand of thinking-man’s pop rap. What they’ve had since 1994’s Illmatic is the type of artist relationship that barely exists in rap anymore—the marquee beatmaker routinely reuniting with a rapper to grace them with one surefire smash single per album. For almost as long as Nas and Preemo have been working together, dorks on the rap internet have been speculating and wishcasting a full Nas-and-Premier album, applying the transitive property that if they could only lock in for a sustained long play, the union that brought us shit like “I Gave You Power”, “2nd Childhood” and “Nas Is Like” would obviously produce the greatest album ever made.