“One Mic”
Possibly the crowning jewel on a album filled to the brim with gems, “One Mic” is simply a lesson in creativity that probably had other cutting edge emcees scratching their heads and wondering why they didn’t think of it first. Nas simply rides the first two verses with a mellow to gradually ecstatic flow that mirrors the track. Then for the third verse, right when you think you have the flow of the song down, he reverses the pattern to begin in an uproar only to quell the flow by the end of the verse. Simplistic genius.
