It’s an entirely different lyrical Nas compared to illmatic, live at the BBQ, back to the grill, and halftime. It was a very commercial album, and was not well received by the underground.

Nas is a great MC. It’s just that his music direction after illmatic was very bad, so instead of getting classic album after classic album, we got a few gems here and there, but nothing even close to illmatic.

There are tons of videos, articles, etc, about how Nas musically fell off at illmatic, or has been unable to make another classic album.