Did Nas jack a Wordsmith track?

You guys heard the recently leaked "Surviving The Times" track from Nas, right? It's off his forthcoming Greatest Hits package, and my boy Wordsmith hit me with this link, discussing the similarities between a track of his entitled "As The Art Fades Away" and the Nas track (hear Words' track on his MySpace page). Check some excerpts of Wordsmith's piece about the similarities between the two:

I wrote my track “As the Art Fades Away” in 2006, as an unofficial version that I actually recently re-recorded for my debut album “The Next Level Experience” on Saturday, October 6th until I heard about this. My in house producer Strada made this beat a year ago and I am here to just state the facts and not attack Nas, so I just ask that everyone judges this fairly. No producer is going start a track the exact same way and no producer is going use the same sounds, loops, rhythems, etc. to create a track. My version starts off with a sample of my own voice saying “The pop rap charts make the art fade away” followed by “That’s the whole tragic point my friend.” Now, whoever produced Nas’s version, and I heard its Chris Webber, which sounds rather odd to me, would not start there track off with the same sample unless they heard it somewhere else first. To me they strung the sample out from there, so it would sound different, but the piano, horn, and baseline are exactly the same way my producer laid his.

So Words is saying Chris Webber (will Nas ever learn?) might have cribbed how Words' track started ouw, samples and all? Chris needs to be training, not producing (jacking?) beats for Escobar...

Two, my producer used “What Would I do” as the hook part of my song and I Chose to fill it in by saying Imagine if certain rappers never did what they did, how would the game be. Nas’s version uses the same concept, but the producer uses a different section of the song where its says,”What Would I do,” from the Wiz and just looped the hook. I have never officially released this track and it can only be heard on my myspace page.

Reminds me of the whole Apex Productions/"I Get Money" MySpace cribbing...

Finally, please don't look at this as I am complaining because I am not, I just felt the need to speak on it because so many great people have come to my defense, so I would like to thank everyone out there for that and I even would like to think any haters as well because we all have a job to do. So what I have done is post links to both tracks below, please check them out and leave your comments.

What do you think? The Nas track; the Wordsmith track. Did they jack Wordsmith?

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