Milestones

Nas

Name: Nas – Illmatic
Item: Illmatic
Author: Michele Corrado

Illmatic

1994 (Columbia)

east coast hip-hop, hardcore hip-hop

by Michele Corrado

The city never sleeps, full of villians and creeps

That’s where I learned to do my hustle had to scuffle with freaks

(da “N.Y. State Of Mind”)

The wait

Nasir bin Olu Dara Jones started going by Nasty Nas in 1989, at sixteen years old. That nickname would become one of the few alternatives known to most listeners besides his more famous, simple stage name, Nas. Just three letters, but destined to represent an upheaval of hip-hop itself.

If Rakim transformed the art of rapping, massively introducing internal and multisyllabic rhymes and reinventing the very idea of hip-hop lyricism — turning it from something rawer and more improvised into a clockwork mechanism refined down to every syllable — then Nas is his heir. And yet, for this talented kid from the Queensbridge projects, who dropped out of school early and struggled through his parents' divorce right in the middle of adolescence, landing a record deal proves difficult. His early recordings pass from hand to hand before reaching Faith Newman at Sony, the first person to recognize his potential. From there, executive producer MC Serch puts Nas in touch with various producers, among whom the legendary DJ Premier stands out, forging a perfect creative chemistry.

The wait for the debut electrifies the scene of the time, because Nas is still young, but the first album, the one he's writing, already promises to be something that will leave its mark. Even the title dispenses with humility, describing the project as something extreme and definitive: "Illmatic," to be understood as extremely "ill," roughly translating to "sick," "twisted," but also "strong" and "definitive." In fact, both the artist's name and the title reveal very little, merely hinting that something incredible and unprecedented awaits, without giving the unsuspecting listener and buyer much more to go on.

Something more is said by the cover art. On the legendary cover of "Illmatic," the face of young Nasir bin Olu Dara Jones and the streets of New York, both duly blurred and tinged with orange, overlap, creating an indissoluble bond. It's impossible to say which of the two images is more in focus, to the point of creating a symbolic juxtaposition, an image with a life of its own destined to be immortalized in the history of hip-hop until the end of time. Nas is New York, but New York is also Nas. An image that perfectly represents what we're about to hear on the record: the story of a young man plays out in the Big Apple and cannot be separated from it. The streets of Queensbridge are far more than a backdrop in Nasir Jones's elastic lyrics; they are in fact just as much protagonists as the people who walk them. The man becomes asphalt and concrete, his breath is exhaust fumes, his voice the synthesis of a way of life that unites dream and nightmare, carries the day into the night with no continuity, bitterly mixes sweetness and tragedy, innocence and violence.

When "Illmatic" hit stores on April 19, 1994, something changed, splitting hip-hop history into a before and an after, forcing every major rapper of the decades to come to reckon with this album, if only to stand in opposition to it. The more skeptical might argue that "Illmatic," being a New York album, had an impact confined to the East Coast, while the West Coast followed its own parallel path, but "Illmatic" has the power to reinvent hip-hop right where it was born, making it an act of refoundation that, in the long run, would go on to influence the California scene as well and, more broadly, the very idea of what a hip-hop album can and cannot be.

The songs

Straight out the fuckin’ dungeons of rap

Where fake niggas don't make it back

(from the guitar to "N.Y. State Of Mind")

Enterin "Illmatic" is like landing in New York without going through JFK, La Guardia or Newark. You're dropped straight into the ghetto. It's told to us by a nineteen-year-old who, forever camouflaged among dealers and junkies, seems to have lived through far more springs than his age would suggest. Nas's words sketch out the intersections, the battered signs and the lights that slash through the night, with essential support from the beats of the aforementioned Dj Premier but also Large Professor, L.E.S., Q-Tip and the beat by Pete Rock. An all star crew of producers busy in those years codifying the East Coast sound, writing hip-hop's present and imagining its future, who nonetheless, to paint the backdrops of "Illmatic", blended their crisp, plastic beats with the most rubbery basslines possible and the city's priceless jazz heritage, a world Nas had known since childhood, given that his father Olu Dara was a Mississippi blues and jazz musician. A broad, pliable palette, used however to build backdrops that were coherent, uniform yet vibrant.

In such a bleak context, you need the right mindset, one prone to cunning and always on alert. The record, and with it Nas's career, could only begin under the banner of this attitude, with the first proper song titled "N.Y. State Of Mind." Tempo shifts, fluid mutations of flow, switches of narrating voice, chiasmus, alliteration, rhymes: it takes just four verses for young Nasir to lay bare the perils of the concrete jungle that gave him birth and its own specific weight, the same weight as history itself. Around him, DJ Premier cuts, stitches and loops jazz fragments lifted from Joe Chambers's "Mind Rain" and Donald Byrd's "Flight Time" to the point of obsession. The close of the first verse stands as one of the starkest summations of the New York of that era, when, to the razor-sharp descriptions of urban decay, Nas adds four lines worthy of an epitaph, the distillation of a life of tension and anguish:

It drops deep as it does in my breath

I never sleep, ‘cause sleep is the cousin of death

Beyond the walls of intelligence, life is defined

I think of crime when I’m in a New York State of Mind

Everything promised in the thunderous guitar "The Genesis", a ghetto talk scathing, laid over beat square-cut beats has already taken shape, in five minutes destined to become legend and a benchmark. But it's only the beginning.

Life’s a bitch and then you die, that’s why we get high

'Cause you never know when you're gonna go

It isn't Nas who raps the lines quoted above, probably the most famous in “Illmatic”, but AZ, the man behind the featuring luckiest in hip-hop history. His flow elastic, sing-song flow is perfect for crystallizing the meaning of the song. A track in which the nineteen-year-old Nas is glad to have survived a rough childhood, the robberies committed against tourists, all the crack he sold. It's certainly also a track with a gangstaattitude, where however there's no glorification of a criminal past, but rather a kind of self-analysis from someone who managed to get back on the right track: it's street music, sidewalk-level, sprouted under bridges and in the subway, the underground of hip-hop, the "dungeon of rap".

When I was young at this I used to do my thing hard

Robbin’ foreigners, take they wallets, they jewels and rip they green cards

Dipped to the projects, flashin’ my quick cash

And got my first piece of ass, smokin’ blunts with hash

Now it’s all about cash in abundance

Niggas I used to run with is rich or doin’ years in the hundreds

I switched my motto; instead of sayin’, “Fuck tomorrow!”

That buck that bought a bottle could’ve struck the lotto

Once I stood on the block, loose cracks produce stacks

I cooked up and cut small pieces to get my loot back

Time is illmatic, keep static like wool fabric

Pack a 4-matic to crack your whole cabbage

Nasir's past and childhood come back here too. In the cornet notes made to soar by Olu Dara, Nas's father, threaded through L.E.S.'s samples at the rapper's own request, as Nas reportedly asked his father for a sequence of notes that would remind him of his childhood.

Like the two tracks that precede it, “The World Is Yours” is also often ranked among the greatest hip-hop songs of all time. Here too, if the competition weren't what it is, the claim could easily be taken as fact. This is certainly the political peak of the album, where the condition of Black America takes center stage in Nas's verses.

Dwellin’ in the Rotten Apple, you get tackled

Or caught by the devil’s lasso, shit is a hassle

The muted piano loop, Pete Rock's off-kilter beat, a central section marked by unrestrained turntablism, and a hook delivered like an inner dialogue also make it one of the most melodically clear and musically daring episodes on the record.

Halfway across the ford we find the relentless “Halftime,” Nas's very first single, which indeed appears here under his old moniker Nasty Nas. Bass and beat are thick yet driving, pushing forward in an uptempo groove that serves as a springboard for some of the sharpest verses on the album. Nas once again mulls over life in the neighborhood, blending nostalgic images with far less reassuring ones.

It’s like that, you know it’s like that

I got it hemmed, now you never get the mic back

When I attack, there ain’t a army that could strike back

So I react, never calmly on a hype track

I set it off with my own rhyme

'Cause I'm as ill as a convict who kills for phone time

I max like cassettes, I flex like sex

In your stereo sets, Nas'll catch wreck

I used to hustle, now all I do is relax and strive

When I was young, I was a fan of The Jackson 5

I drop jewels, wear jewels, hope to never run it

With more kicks than a baby in a mother’s stomach

“Memory Lane (Sittin’ In Da Park)” is an exercise in elegance, sublimated when the vocals echo a gospel prayer thanks to the sample sample of Reuben Wilson's “We’re In Love.” It stands in contrast to the more mournful “One Love” (feat. Q-Tip), a collection of thoughts for incarcerated friends set over a jazz-rap nocturne for vibraphone that samples the Heath Brothers' “Smilin’ Billy Suite Part II.”

Dear Born, you'll be out soon, stay strong

Out in New York the same shit is goin’ on

The crackheads stalkin’, loudmouths is talkin’

Hold, check out the story yesterday when I was walkin’

That nigga you shot last year tried to appear

Like he hurtin' somethin'

Word to mother, I heard him frontin'

And he be pumpin’ on your block

Your man gave him your Glock

And now they run together — what up, son? Whatever

The slower “One Time 4 Your Mind” allows Nas to unleash lyrical virtuosity that still astonishes today.

What up, niggas? How y’all? It’s Nasty, the villain

I’m still writin’ rhymes, but besides that, I’m chillin’

I’m tryin’ to get this money, God — you know the hard times, kid

Shit, cold, be starvin' make you wanna do crimes, kid

But I'ma lamp 'cause a crime couldn't beat a rhyme

Niggas catchin’ 3-to-9’s, Muslims yellin’ “Free the mind!”

And I’m from Queensbridge, been to many places

As a kid, when I would say that outta town, niggas chased us

But now I know the time, got a older mind, plus control a 9

Fine, see, now I represent mine

These tracks lead to the closing one-two punch, made up of the anthem "Represent", which with its chorus later became old school a classic at countless hip-hop parties, and with its curious sample vintage sample of Lee Erwin's "Thief Of Baghdad", and "It Ain't Hard To Tell", the album's lead single, built on a sample of "Human Nature" by Michael Jackson made possible only by the record label. This last track, also the star of a famous remix, closes the album with yet another declaration of superiority in the lyrics:

My poetry’s deep, I never fell

Nas’ raps should be locked in a cell; it ain’t hard to tell

L'eredità

By the end of 1994, "Illmatic" had only reached number twelve on the Billboard chart, going gold two years later. By 2001, however, it had sold a million copies, a figure that would double again by 2019. This statistic helps convey the importance and historical scope of Nas' debut.

The arrival of "Illmatic" on the scene was, in truth, a shock. While critics acclaimed it, the scene and younger listeners, or at least a good portion of them, greeted it with some caution. It was indeed a strange object. Certainly rooted in East Coast culture and its artsy leanings — just look at the producers involved (starting with Q-Tip, whose A Tribe Called Quest were a true standard-bearer of New York culture) — it was also decidedly open to cross-pollination. It can certainly be considered a hardcore hip-hop record, a subcurrent it would help revive in its own geographic area, but also, to a certain extent, akin to gangsta aesthetics, albeit in a self-analytical way, far removed from the clichés that were starting to plague g-funk. It's therefore an album released in the thick of the feud between the two coasts, yet one that remained stylistically quite cross-cutting and was appreciated on both sides for its ability to renew the very idea of what a hip-hop album could be, and how deep its musical storytelling could reach.

All these traits, along with an incredible narrative and introspective bent that in some ways gives the record a singer-songwriter's intensity and depth, make it a precursor to a huge amount of rap to come, from hardcore hip-hop to more experimental abstract rap, as well as a significant contribution to jazz-rap's various strands. It's hard to look at the careers of other giants of Nineties rap — from contemporaries like Notorious B.I.G. and Mobb Deep to the slightly later Jay-Z and Busta Rhymes, right up to the ultimate crossover pop-rapper Eminem — without drawing comparisons and connections, similarities and differences, with "Illmatic". Even one of the most famous names in West Coast rap, Tupac Shakur, seems to have reacted with great enthusiasm on first listen. Among its avowed admirers, though, we also find some unlikely names, such as pianist and pop star Alicia Keys, Southern rap giants Clipse, or the late emo-rapper Mac Miller, who sampled it on "Nikes On My Feet".

"Illmatic" has been not just a reference point but often a genuine blueprint to draw on, as was the case with Common's "Be" (2015). To quote Richard Watson of the Guardian, "Illmatic" has become a totem, "a work that looked into the history of the past and pointed to its future". What's more, scholars and academics have analyzed and explored it too, searching for the deeper reasons behind its aesthetic magic, its communicative power. Its secret is that there's "something complex about its simplicity, something elusive that we felt compelled to explore", to quote hip-hop expert Sohail Daulatzai. Every listen is a new discovery, every rhyme leads to other rhymes, other tracks, other thoughts, other considerations.

The rise in "Illmatic"'s sales over the years mirrors exactly the growth of its reputation as a landmark of the genre, and how, as time has passed, it has become an unshakeable point of reference. As music critic Jeff Weiss puts it, it has become hip-hop's gold standard, the equivalent of what Highway 61 Revisited by Bob Dylan is for baby boomers.

It's no coincidence that the American specialist press is always on the lookout for the fabled new "Illmatic". It's a label that was pinned, for instance, on the debut of Kendrick Lamar, and not without some hesitation from the man himself, who was openly honored but also worried about being unable to stand comparison with one of the highest peaks in the history of hip-hop. Not even Nas himself would manage to replicate that level again, and perhaps he didn't need to. His long subsequent career has taken him elsewhere, partly in a direction that moved him away from the weight of an impossible expectation, from the demand to repeat a masterpiece with few parallels in the genre's entire fifty-year history. In 2020, though, the King returned in finer form than ever, buoyed by a quarter-century's distance from his debut, rendered unassailable by the test of time: he settled onto hip-hop's throne, from which he can plausibly aim to string together a series of albums that are more modern yet still anchored to the streets where it all began. Seen live in 2023, during a rare Italian date, he's a fifty-year-old whose face still recalls the one on "Illmatic"'s iconic cover, and who, when "N.Y. State Of Mind" kicks in, can still pull off the miracle.

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14/04/2024

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Michele Corrado, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition

Tracklist

1. The Genesis
2. N.Y. State of Mind
3. Life's a Bitch feat. AZ
4. The World Is Yours
5. Halftime
6. Memory Lane (Sittin' in da Park)
7. One Love
8. One Time 4 Your Mind
9. Represent
10. It Ain't Hard to Tell

NAS on the web

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Nas

New York State Of Mind

Nas is considered one of the greatest rappers of all time. With his debut "Illmatic" he wrote one of the genre's absolute masterpieces, but he didn't stop there: he's kept going right up to today, through changes of direction, second thoughts and pauses for reflection