The burdens of early genius: Nas, Prince, and Wainwright try to match their own high standards

Nas, the New York rapper born Nasir Jones who plays the Keswick Theatre on Sunday and Monday, has released 13 albums over a 20-year career.

One is of far greater consequence than the others. No credible list of the 10 greatest rap albums of all time omits Illmatic, his 1994 debut. That startlingly cinematic document of growing up in the Queensbridge housing projects, recorded when he was 19, often lands in the No. 1 spot.

The towering achievement of Illmatic is celebrated in director One9's perceptive documentary Nas: Time is Illmatic, which will be screened both nights at the Keswick before the MC performs the album in its entirety. (The movie then opens Friday at the AMC Cherry Hill.)

So has Nas ever again risen to such heights? And if not, when will he?

That's a common question for anyone with a monster debut, in pop music or, for that matter, the arts in general.

San Francisco psychedelic band Moby Grape never lived up to its acclaimed 1967 self-titled debut, and fans of hip-hop heroine Lauryn Hill, who plays the Electric Factory on Nov. 15, are still waiting for the follow-up to her landmark 1998 solo album.

It's much the way literature lovers spent decades waiting for, and never getting, another novel from J.D. Salinger after Catcher in the Rye (1951), Ralph Ellison after Invisible Man (1952), or Harper Lee (now 88) since To Kill a Mockingbird (1960).

Nas, son of jazz-blues griot Olu Dara, is in something like the same predicament regarding Illmatic. It's not as though he's been paralyzed by writer's block or been inactive. He's carried on with career peaks and valleys, one of the peaks being his 2001 album, Stillmatic, meant to show he still had it.

In that respect, he bears more resemblance to a much-loved, staggeringly talented artist who put out two new albums last week that, even if they're really good, can't possibly live up to the impossibly high standards he set for himself early in his career.

That would be Prince, the polymorphous, now-56-year-old purple wonder who may still be the greatest live performer on the planet - please come to Philadelphia, Mr. Nelson, please - who let loose both the deliciously funky, high-concept solo album Art Official Age (***1/2) and the guitar-heavy, hard-rocking Plectrumelectrum (**1/2), with female power trio 3RDEYEGIRL.

(In a signal of the seriousness of the comeback effort, both albums have been released by Warner Bros., the label whose unhappy relationship with Prince once caused him to change his name to a glyph and write the word slave on his cheek.)

I can tell you Prince sounds revitalized, particularly in the charmingly loopy Art Official Age, which, as you might expect, is framed by a story of a man who spent 45 years in suspended animation being awakened by an otherworldly being (voiced by British jazz-pop singer Lianne La Havas).

And though AOA - whose title is a play on the "artificial cage" in which the corporeal world imprisons the human spirit - is clearly the stronger of the two releases, anyone jonesing to hear Prince the guitar god unleash his Hendrix moves and Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath riffs needs to get Plectrumelectrum, which also boasts some sweeter pop moments, such as the enticing ballad "Whitecaps."

But no matter how much high praise the double dose of 2014 tunes garners, and no matter how much more engaged in the creative process Prince seems to be on his 33d and 34th albums, the new music can't hope to come close to the brilliantly consistent body of work he put together as he rose to superstardom.

Starting with Dirty Mind in 1980, including Purple Rain in 1984, and continuing to his last absolutely must-have, incontrovertible work of genius, Sign o' the Times in 1987, he defined the 1980s just as surely as Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen did.

Not to say that Prince and Nas or any artist lucky or unlucky enough to have forged his or her most galvanizing work in the hot fire of youth shouldn't carry on creating. Every day, the age range of pop music fans gets wider, and as baby boomers reach retirement age, there are plenty of geezers longer in the tooth than Prince still doing solid work. Newly octogenarian song-poet Leonard Cohen, who just released the fine Almost Like the Blues, is the poster boy for not going gently into that good night.

But the artistic burden of trying to measure up to your own impossibly high standards can be onerous. For every still-adventurous example - like Led Zep front man Robert Plant, who's successfully turned away from stadium-sized temptation to pursue smaller-scale spiritual adventures - there's a cautionary tale like Citizen Kane director Orson Welles, intimidated by his own titanic creation.

When set next to "classic" material, an artist's new work can draw withering critical judgment. As Springsteen said when he inducted Bob Dylan into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988, "Bob's own modern work has gone unjustly underappreciated for having to stand in [his own] shadow. . . . If there was a young guy out there writing 'Every Grain of Sand,' they'd be calling him 'the new Bob Dylan.' "

The artists who continue to produce at a high level as decades roll by tend to be strivers who didn't achieve all their dreams right out of the box. In hip-hop, a prime example would be Philadelphia's Roots, who have released 14 studio albums, one of which, 1999's Things Fall Apart, finally sold its millionth copy 14 years after it was released.

In terms of former new Dylans, an excellent example would be Loudon Wainwright III, the 68-year-old songwriter who plays the Ardmore Music Hall on Friday. LWIII has yet another fine new album, called Haven't Got the Blues (Yet), continuing a remarkable run that has seemed to find old Loudo getting better as time goes by. Then again, maybe it just seems that way, because he doesn't have a masterpiece like Illmatic or Purple Rain to suffer in comparison to.

215-854-5628 @delucadan

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