Today in Hip-Hop — August 21: Nas Breaks His Grammy Curse With King’s Disease, 6 Years Ago Today

August 21, 2020 — a Friday in the pandemic haze — Nasir bin Olu Dara Jones dropped a 13-track surprise album with almost zero rollout and quietly ended one of hip-hop’s longest-running injustices. King’s Disease. Six years ago today. Nas was 46, had 13 Grammy nominations and zero wins across a career that began before some of that year’s Best Rap Album shortlist was born. Six months later he walked out of the 63rd Grammys with the trophy for King’s Disease — and hip-hop’s greatest Grammy snub joke got a punchline no one saw coming.

The Album That Finally Cracked The Vault

Every track produced by Hit-Boy. That’s the sentence to lead with, because it’s the sentence that reset the last five years of Nas’s catalog. Before King’s Disease, Nas had spent the 2010s hopping producers, chasing beats, occasionally landing (Life Is Good), often just occupying the room without commanding it. Hit-Boy — a Compton beatsmith who’d cut his teeth making “Ni**as in Paris” and “Backseat Freestyle” for the Watch the Throne / GKMC generation — turned out to be the sonic partner Nas had been missing since DJ Premier and Large Professor stopped answering the phone. Together they built a spare, chest-thumping, mid-tempo boom-bap that let a 46-year-old Nas rap like a 24-year-old Nas without the album ever sounding nostalgic.

The receipts are wild once you pull them out. “Ultra Black” — the pre-release single with the “the beauty is Black” hook — pulled a name-drop shot at Doja Cat that pitched the album into cultural news cycles it had no business landing in. “Full Circle” reassembled The Firm — AZ, Cormega, Foxy Brown — for the first time since 1997, with Dr. Dre executive-cameoing on the intro like a producer signing off a signed peace treaty. Anderson .Paak lent “All Bad” the album’s smoothest hook; Charlie Wilson delivered on “Car #85” the way Uncle Charlie always does; Fivio Foreign and Lil Durk got “27 Summers” and “Til the War Is Won” respectively, splitting the drill and Chicago vote in the same tracklist without collision.

Then March 14, 2021 happened. Best Rap Album — King’s Disease beat Freddie Gibbs & Alchemist’s Alfredo, D Smoke’s Black Habits, Jay Electronica’s A Written Testimony, and Royce da 5’9’’s The Allegory. Nas gave a two-minute acceptance speech that read like a man who’d rehearsed it in his head for two decades. Hit-Boy said afterward it was the loudest phone call he’d ever gotten. What Hit-Boy and Nas did next — King’s Disease II (2021), King’s Disease III (2022), Magic trilogy (2021, 2023, 2023) — is one of the most concentrated late-career runs any MC has ever assembled. Six albums in three years. All with the same producer. All classic-adjacent. The King’s Disease template didn’t just win a Grammy — it wrote the rest of Nas’s discography.

Also today in hip-hop

• Big Sean drops “Deep Reverence” feat. Nas — same day. August 21, 2020. Second single from Detroit 2. Nas closes the record with a verse referencing Nipsey Hussle’s murder — released hours after his own album quietly ended a two-decade Grammy drought. Full-day Nas takeover. Coincidence? Sean will tell you otherwise; Hit-Boy produced both.
• Kelis turns 47. August 21, 1979 — Harlem-born Kelis Rogers, LaGuardia-trained jazz singer who let The Neptunes redraw pop-rap production twice — first with 1999’s “Caught Out There” (that scream still rearranges dance floors) and again with 2003’s “Milkshake,” still the most-quoted eight-bar hook of the Y2K era. She married and divorced Nas somewhere in between; the culture is smaller than it looks.
• Slaughterhouse — welcome to: OUR HOUSE turns 14. August 21, 2012. Joe Budden, Crooked I, Joell Ortiz, Royce da 5’9’’ — four battle-rap heavyweights corralled by Eminem onto Shady Records for their major-label debut. Debuted at #2 (blocked by Dave Matthews of all people), produced in part by — read this twice — Hit-Boy, Alex da Kid, Just Blaze, and No I.D. The bar-for-bar lineage runs straight to today’s Griselda pen game.

Stay creative — The Custom Creative Team

Jon Jones