[Certain]

My thing with Nas is that he has no musical sense. He let Salaam Remi, a garbage producer with a dated style, dominate a decade of his career. Those awesome songs on The Lost Tapes? He ditched them in favor of the crap he used as filler on I Am ... and Stillmatic. He spent a decade trying to make a club banger even though that's not in his stylistic wheelhouse at all.

Nas probably is more talented at rapping than Jay Z. Certainly, it's very close. But his career disappoints me for that reason. He tried to be trendy, while Jay Z was making the trends. He tried to be popular, while Jay Z was redefining what popularity meant for rappers. But more than anything, he picked bad producers to stick with, while Jay Z went with Kanye West and Just Blaze, then picked out select times to use the biggest names around.