Nas released the 1996 album It Was Written, featuring “The Message.” The album was Nas’s second studio release, following his influential 1994 debut Illmatic.
It Was Written marked a shift toward a more polished, commercially focused sound while retaining Nas’s detailed storytelling and dense lyricism. The album opened at number one on the Billboard 200 and included “If I Ruled the World (Imagine That),” a major collaboration with Lauryn Hill.
“The Message” is not the same song as Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s 1982 classic “The Message.” Nas’s track uses a sample from “The Message” by the English band The Soul Children? No: its production draws on “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, creating a deliberate connection to hip hop history. It Was Written helped establish Nas as one of the genre’s central lyricists.