Nas' "Greatest Hits": A Track-By-Track Journey With the Pride of Queens

"Life's a Bitch" featuring AZ and Olu Dara, from Illmatic

"I asked my dad to play on the end of it — I told him to play whatever comes to mind when he thinks of me as a kid. I think he's really proud to see me coming up and really taking my life serious and doing what I want."

"N.Y. State of Mind" from Illmatic

"That one right there is one of my favorites, because that one painted a picture of the City like nobody else at that time. I'm about eighteen when I'm saying that rhyme. I worked on that first album all my life, up until I was twenty, when it came out. I was a very young cat talking about it like a Vietnam veteran, talking like I've been through it all. That's just how I felt around that time, and the track does that for me."

"One Love" featuring Q-Tip, from Illmatic

"Q-Tip used to come and hang out with me in my projects from time to time. I remember him coming out there and hanging out, and I remember him letting me hang out at his session when he was working on Midnight Marauders. I thought he was just the most incredible, so to have him producing my album, for him to even do the chorus for me is a blessing. The song just came from life, it's a song about letters to prison inmates, friends of mine, shout-outs to childhood friends and their uncles and people who were like family to me. I was, again, too young to be going through all of that. That's what I think about when I hear that album. I was too young to be going through all of that."

"If I Ruled the World"featuring Lauryn Hill, from It Was Written

"That was my second album. Obviously, if you have a strong impact, you get a lot of people sounding like you, so it made me feel like, 'Man, I'm just a grain of sand on the beach now.' I used to stand out on the first album, but now everyone was talking about the same thing in the same kind of way, coming out of New York, so how could I change it, how could I be a million miles away from everything that was coming out so you could know who the originator is? 'If I Ruled the World,' that's when I teamed up with Trackmaster, and I figured I needed a change, so I teamed up with the best at the time, and they cut the track together and just needed someone to sing the chorus. When Lauryn Hill came to mind, it was just right on time. It's funny, because when we released the record, people didn't know it was Lauryn Hill, because I guess we just white-labeled it at first and didn't want anybody to know — anticipation for my second album was so great, we didn't want any distractions from people to keep them from listening to me. At that point, the Fugees album had just come out and blew up, so we left her name off of it, and for about two to three weeks, by the time we let people know who was on the record, it was already taking off. So when they found out it was her, forget about it, man. Forget about it."