Sometimes things just line up perfectly. Jay-Z’s critically acclaimed fifth album, The Blueprint, was fresh in everyone’s mind, thanks in part to the song “Takeover,” which mercilessly took aim at Nas, effectively kicking him while he was down. Jay’s star was rising, while Nas’s was fading. He was dangerously close to every artist’s worst fear: having peaked with his first album. Two songs into Stillmatic is all the time it takes to put that fear to rest.

“Ether” is a song so scathing that it birthed an entire slang term to convey utter dominance over your opponent. Jay’s career suffered no long-term effects from the diss, but Nas’s did; just not in the way anyone expected. The guy who was coming off the worst album of his career and had become the butt of jokes (“smarten up, Nas” became message-board shorthand) had re-positioned himself as one of rap’s most dangerous wordsmiths. The stench of “Oochie Wally” was no more.

But the wonderful thing about Stillmatic (brilliantly dope title, by the way) is that it’s so much more than “Ether.” By late 2001, Nas had evolved from the cartoonishly embellished underworld tales of Nas Escobar into something different entirely. This is Nasir Jones giving commentary on everything from racism to America’s capitalist hold on its people. It’s Nasir Jones looking at old cohorts from his hood and telling them to get their shit together. It’s Nasir Jones looking back at the last decade of his career, contemplating whether a shot at fame was worth all the nonsense he’s had to deal with since. Stillmatic is grounded in a level of human realism we hadn’t heard in much of his music up to this point, and it’s a revelation. This newfound focus is married to some of the best production you’ll find on any rap album, with longtime collaborators DJ Premier, Trackmasters, Large Professor, and L.E.S. all rising to the occasion.

Illmatic had cast its shadow over Nas from the very beginning, and in the years since, he’d toyed with different ways to escape it. The events that led to Jay’s opening salvo on “Takeover” gave Nas exactly what he needed to enter the next phase of his career—a phase where he no longer had to jockey with Hov for attention. Stillmatic gave us the Nas we’d been waiting for since 1994. Sometimes things just line up perfectly.