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Hey, who told MTV to change their video player? Anyway, photographer extraordinaire Danny Hastings recounts Nas’ cover shoot for I Am (which by the way is a slept-on album). He says his team took an actual molding of Nas’ face causing him to suffocate. That’s the kind of death that makes your soul burn slow.

“The first one, you have him being a boy, very young. The second was a little bit older. And the third one, he was a king. He already conquered the world. He was on top of the world. He was doing a lot of big things. We came with the concept of making a King Tut sarcophagus piece…The funny part was that the first attempt, Nas was getting asphyxiated. We almost killed Nas,” Hastings said, laughing in hindsight.