Nas

– WORDS: Zach Klassen • PHOTOS: Todd Cooper

I’m still not sure why Nas came to Eugene. This town doesn’t seem to be a prime center for his kind of listening demographic. However, I couldn’t be happier that he decided to make the trip out west and I’m sure that all the people who pushed, shoved and crammed their way into McDonald Theater last Wednesday night would be quick to agree with me. The place was packed. With a cannon of music spanning over a decade it was easy for Nas to keep the hits coming all night. In fact, the man has so many classic songs to perform that he wasn’t able to play them all in their entirety, stopping in the middle of some tracks in order to segue into the next. “There are too many songs,” Nas admitted. “But I’ll play as many as I fucking can.” And in some way, shape or form they were all accounted for. Opening with “Hip Hop Is Dead”, Nas moved through “If I Ruled The World (Imagine That)”, “Black Republicans”, “NY State Of Mind”, “Get Down”, “Represent”, “Made You Look” (which I almost missed on the way to the bathroom), and countless others. You name it, he played it and the crowd loved it. At first I was unsure about how us Eugene folk would react to Nastradamus, but it was soon obvious that the rapper wasn’t leaving without a roaring reception as drinks were poured and weed smoke drifted around the theater. The show was solid from back to front, no doubt, but there was only one thing the crowd seemed disappointed about – no encore.