ESSENCE Festival headliner Nas got the New Orleans Superdome crowd hype as he played hit after hit on Thursday night, the opening night to this Fourth of July weekend.
Celebrating the 20th anniversary of his classic LP Illmatic, the legendary rapper pefromed a slew of tracks from that album as well as other popular hit singles.
Before starting his final song, “One Mic,” the legendary rapper announced that he would like to dedicate the song to the late Maya Angelou. “I’d like to dedicate this to the queen Maya Angelou,” he said before starting the single’s first set of bars.
Nas often refers to himself as a poet in his lyrics—”Nas is like..a poor man’s dream, a thug poet/Live it and I write down and I watch it blow up,” he raps in his 1999 single “Nas Is Like” — so it was quite fitting that he decided to dedicate one of his most lyricaly-driven songs to the legendary poet.