Never On Schedule But Always On Time

Nas featuring Chrisette Michele “Can’t Forget About You” – Sampling Nat King Cole’s “Unforgettable” is sort of a cheap grab for sentimentality, but in this song, that’s exactly the point. Nas, perhaps the one star under the age of 40 who ought to feel free to wallow in nostalgia, spends the entire track in an odd moebius strip of sentimental yearning by imagining himself as an old man looking back on his glory days, but either in the future or present tense that seems to mean “the early 90s.” The sample actually makes perfect sense in this context given that Natalie Cole’s “duet” with her father on this song was a huge hit during the period Nas is romanticizing, and so the source material becomes a shorthand for the Good Old Days twice over. (Click here to pre-order it from Amazon.)

Elsewhere: A chorus of senior citizens perform a surprisingly awesome cover of Sonic Youth’s “Schizophrenia,” and it is simultaneously a new apex of WTFness and somehow totally logical. (Thanks to Brian Turner.)