At Plush on Thursday, October 4

On purely technical grounds, Nasir Jones might be the best rapper ever; his cadence is flawless and his voice a strident rasp that practically embodies rap's hard-bitten Big Apple ethos. As a writer, too, Nas is prototypical; his meticulously detailed stories weave together rap's holy trinity of themes: violence, nostalgia, and pride. The Queens native is so good that he's almost anonymous, his written and vocal perfection effacing the quirks and foibles that brought some of his peers (like Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls) more fame.

While his popular reach isn't terribly wide, Nas inspires an almost terrifying zeal in his biggest fans. Those who call him their favourite rapper are genre purists, kitted head to toe in a standard-issue street uniform whose only variation is the colour of one's Yankees cap. Red, white, or classic navy, those hats bobbed as one as their hero stormed Plush last week, his puffy black North Face jacket billowing as he tore through "Money Over Bullsh*t", from 2006's excellent Hip Hop Is Dead . Then came an awkward moment of silence, during which it seemed to register on his disciples that their lord, whom most had only ever heard from afar–in their bedrooms after school, say, or on headphones in the wee hours–was now literally within reach. You could almost see the chills running down the spines of even the most stony-faced fans in the audience.

A moment later, all you could see was mayhem, Nas performing a suite of songs from his epochal debut, 1994's Illmatic , maybe the closest a rap album has ever come to perfection. In future years, one can imagine the MC dividing his concerts into halves, the first a song-by-song replay of Illmatic , the second a survey of the spotty and sorely compromised material he's recorded since. On this night, however, the New Yorker grazed randomly through his massive catalogue, picking out tracks from his middling mid-career albums (1999's I Am and Nastradamus ), lacklustre side projects (the Firm and Bravehearts), and his comeback period (which began with 2001's Stillmatic ). No matter what character he embodied–the hardscrabble street poet of his youth, the mid-period Scarface -like escapades as Nas Escobar, or his recent reincarnation as hip-hop's elder statesman–the man was flawless throughout, rapping, not yelling, commanding the room with no hype man to punch up his lines or stoke the crowd.

At 34, Nas is about the same age as hip-hop itself, and represents in this classicist phase the genre at its best. It's only appropriate, then, that the highlight last Thursday was his inspired rendering of "Made You Look", a song that came out in 2002 but seems like it's been around forever. Founded upon the most recognizable and frequently sampled break in rap history (from the Incredible Bongo Band's "Apache"), "Made You Look" is hip-hop distilled to its essence–its percussive wordplay and tightly coiled harmonics embodying, in some primal way, New York City's very spirit. For as long as the song played, Nas carried a roomful of mostly pale Canadians to that very place.