De La Soul featuring Nas – Run It Back!! Video

De La Soul and Nas are not trying to recreate the past on “Run It Back!!” as much as remind listeners what is worth carrying forward from it. Taken from De La Soul’s tenth studio album, Cabin In The Sky, the track turns its title into a multipurpose phrase: run the record back, return to the fundamentals, and reconsider where Hip-Hop has been compared to where it stands today. Maseo establishes the idea immediately, invoking De La’s Day-Glo history before declaring that lyrically, anything thrown their way is getting run back. Posdnuos then attacks the concept through pure emceeing, packing his verse with internal rhymes, wordplay and references to boom bap tradition. The record was released as part of Cabin In The Sky, De La Soul’s first studio album in nine years and its first following the 2023 death of Dave “Trugoy the Dove” Jolicoeur. The album arrived through Mass Appeal as part of its Legend Has It series.

“Run It Back!!” is also a New York record in a very specific way. Maseo calls out Nassau and Suffolk counties before passing things from Long Island over to Queensbridge, where Nas takes the second verse. That geographic handoff gives the collaboration more meaning than simply attaching a big guest to a De La Soul song. Pos comes first with the kind of densely constructed rhyme patterns that reward rewinding, even working in a nod to Rakim and Paid in Full, before Nas enters with his own interpretation of running things back. Supa Dave West, a longtime De La collaborator, shares production credit with the group, while Posdnuos, Maseo and Nas are all credited among the songwriters. The result is dope without sounding like anyone involved is straining to prove that veteran emcees can still rap. They simply do it.

Nas uses his verse to broaden the song beyond a display of technique. After playing with De La’s famous “three is the magic number” history by jokingly adding himself as a fourth member, he starts looking at the changing economics and visibility of Black music. He names Doechii, Kendrick Lamar, SZA, Leon Thomas and Shaboozey while questioning why relatively few Black artists are occupying the highest reaches of the charts, then traces part of the industry’s transformation back to Napster and the disruption that followed at the end of the 1990s. His question about whether that era cost him diamond plaques is delivered without bitterness. He essentially shrugs it off and runs it back. That makes the title increasingly clever as the song progresses. Nostalgia is present, but this is not simply another “Hip-Hop was better back then” record. Nas is looking at what changed, what was lost and what remains worth preserving.

The Justice Silvera-directed video understands De La Soul’s visual language just as well. Rather than settling for a conventional performance clip, it is creative, colorful and constructed with elements that resemble scrapbooking brought to life. Photographs, cutouts, handwritten-looking graphics, shifting textures and bright colors create the feeling of pages being assembled and rearranged in motion. That aesthetic fits a group whose artwork and videos have always treated visual presentation as an extension of the music rather than an afterthought. It also complements the premise of “Run It Back!!”: pieces of Hip-Hop history are being pulled forward, rearranged and placed into a new frame. The video does not need to manufacture excitement around the collaboration because Pos and Nas already provide it; instead, the visuals give their words an appropriately playful De La universe to inhabit.

There is additional weight to hearing all of this within Cabin In The Sky. The 20-track album includes Nas alongside guests such as Q-Tip, Killer Mike, Black Thought, Common, Slick Rick, Bilal and Yukimi, with production contributions that include DJ Premier, Pete Rock and Supa Dave West. It is an album inevitably connected to absence and continuation, but “Run It Back!!” chooses movement over mourning. Even Giancarlo Esposito’s outro, which humorously tells everyone to slow their heartbeat after running it back, feels unmistakably De La. More than three decades after the group helped expand what Hip-Hop could sound and look like, De La Soul can still make something this playful without sacrificing bars, while Nas sounds completely at home stepping into their world. Sometimes running it back is not about living in the past. It is about remembering what worked, bringing it forward and showing that it still works now.

Listen to Cabin in the Sky on all platforms.