Staring Down A Legend: Nas's "Illmatic", Twelve Years Later

Author's Rating:

Pros: A hungry MC with beats so hot, it doesn't matter what he's saying.

Cons: Two mediocre songs prevent this album from being perfect.

The Bottom Line: 
Revisionist history posts "Illmatic" as the definitive hip-hop album. I say otherwise, but it's damn close. Classic material.

Author's Review
So, first of all, for the record, “Illmatic” is not the best rap album of all time. At least not in my humble opinion. As someone who was a first-hand witness to hip-hop’s golden age (roughly 1988-1994), I can rattle off ten hip-hop albums that I enjoy more than “Illmatic” without thinking.

That said, I’m not sure if I could rattle off another ten without mentioning this album. No matter when you got into hip-hop, clearly “Illmatic” is classic material. As an MC, Nas’s amped, near-breathless delivery is startling. You can tell that this guy had no purpose in life other than to rhyme. All the hype anointing him as “the second coming of Rakim (AKA the greatest MC in history)” was, for the most part, justified. For his debut effort, Nas also had the good fortune to be blessed with some of history’s greatest hip-hop beatmakers. Production wizards like Large Professor, L.E.S., Pete Rock and Q-Tip were holding down the fort for rugged East Coast hip-hop, and they blessed Nas with beats that, for the most part, perfectly complement his heated rhyme style.

In order to understand this album, you’ve gotta understand the history of hip-hop as well as the history of Nas, to a degree. Nasir Jones hailed from Queensbridge Projects, the largest public housing development in the United States. As with any New York kid who grew up in the Eighties, Nas developed a fascination with hip-hop music and culture. It didn’t hurt matters that there was already a series of hip-hop royalty emerging from those projects by the time Nas became a teenager. Old-school rap legends MC Shan and Roxanne Shante hailed from Queensbridge, as did production legend Marley Marl.

At any rate, the legend of Nasty Nas (the “Nasty” made a quick disappearance, never to return again) began pretty quickly with the leadoff verse on “Live at the BBQ”, featured on Main Source’s debut album “Breaking Atoms”. With one line-“Verbal assassin/My architect pleases/When I was 12 I went to hell for snuffin’ Jesus”, Nas became hip-hop’s “Next Big Thing”. Guest appearances on records by 3rd Bass’s MC Serch (who got him signed to Columbia Records), and the first ever 5-mic rating in hip-hop bible “The Source” (back when a 5-mic rating in The Source actually meant something) only built the anticipation for “Illmatic”.

First thing you gotta know, “Illmatic” is definitely a New York hip-hop album. Although MTV and the rise of rappers from outside the N.Y./L.A. axis have cleared the way for a more universal acceptance of regional hip-hop, “Illmatic” is a definite slice of young, lower-class urban life in the outer boroughs of New York City. In 1993 and 1994, hip-hop was just sort of peeking out of the shadows to really hit in Middle America, and this album definitely reminds me of the Friday and Saturday nights I would spend glued to the radio to catch the shows that were playing hip-hop that was a little less pop-oriented than the LL Cool J and Heavy D. records they were playing during the day.

Lyrically, this album kinda goes both ways. Yes, Nas is clearly one of the 10 best MC’s to ever pick up the mic, and he actually confirmed this status over the course of his career, broadening his subject matter even though his albums became less qualitatively consistent. No, that doesn’t make sense, but it does to me. On this album, there’s not a heckuva lot of variation in subject matter. Either Nas is spitting (admittedly hot) bragging rhymes (like “Halftime” or “It Ain’t Hard To Tell”, or spitting rhymes about the life of a young kid in the projects (“The World is Yours”, “New York State of Mind”). What makes these rhymes not fall into the trap of repetition is the delivery. The cool forcefulness of his rhyming keeps your ears glued to the speakers. This is not to mention the fact that he delivers some of the illest punchlines on a hip-hop record ever (“Nas is like the Afrocentric Asian/Half man, half amazin’” or “You couldn’t catch me in the streets without a ton of reefer/That’s like Malcolm X catching the jungle fever”). At moments like this, you can feel Nas’s distillation of all his rhyme influences. He’s authoritative like Rakim, smooth like Kane, and witty like Slick Rick.

The one track where Nas spits a completely clear narrative is easily the album’s best track. The heartfelt “One Love” is basically a rapped letter to a buddy that’s locked up. Nas vividly describes how life on the street has changed since his man caught a bid, and the quiet xylophone-based arrangement by Q-Tip captures the perfect mood for this melancholy song.

Which brings me to what I think is the real star of the show on “Illmatic”-the production. The tracks on here that don’t really do anything for me (“Represent” and “One Time 4 Your Mind”) feature great rhyming from Nas, but the beats are decidedly average. The best of the production manages to combine the powerful kickdrums that announce it as New York hip-hop with jazzy underpinnings familiar to listeners of legendary groups like Gang Starr and A Tribe Called Quest (both of whom have members fill in on production here). “New York State of Mind” and “Halftime” are both examples of minimalist boom-bap at it’s finest. “State of Mind” rides a repetitive piano loop supplied by DJ Premier, while “Halftime” (which was actually released as a single nearly two years prior to “Illmatic”’s street date) is not more than thumping bass and drums, with fragments of a Soul II Soul horn line.

Songs like “Life’s a B!tch” go for a more subdued feel. Although it features some furious rhyming from Nas’s high-pitched homeboy AZ, the song itself has a mellow, hazy feel, due to the sample of The Gap Band’s slow jam classic “Yearning For Your Love”. Even with the rough-hewn lyrics, the song still has a mellow-out vibe, complemented by the muted trumpet playing over the song’s outro, provided by Nas’s own pops, jazz musician Olu Dara. The mellow piano of “The World is Yours” is a testament to the production prowess of Pete Rock, while Large Pro’s “It Ain’t Hard To Tell” succeeds in giving Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature” some thug appeal, with booming drums and a more pronounced bassline.

How much you like this album might depend on how much you dig Nas’s first-person street-reporting skills. Jay-Z famously pulled Nas’s card by questioning his street credentials in “Takeover” (“you ain’t live it/you witnessed it from your folks’ pad/scribbled it in your notepad/created your life”). It’s widely acknowledged that Nas wasn’t exactly a drug-dealing, gun-spraying thug, but I’ll present it to you like this: does the person sitting in Mosul reporting on the war have a different perspective than a soldier actively fighting in the war? Yes. Are both of their views valid? Absolutely. While Nas may not possess the ability to deliver an account in the first-person, he obviously has the storytelling and rhyming skills to deliver these accounts in a way that a lot of the folks living the street life don’t have, and that’s what makes this album a winner.

Over the past decade, “Illmatic” has become both a certified classic and Nas’s own, personal 800 pound gorilla. It was one of the last stands in the golden age of hip-hop, an album that was a direct reflection on the debut albums by two artists whose shadows loom large in hip-hop lore-Notorious B.I.G. and Jay-Z. The issues with Jay have been recounted both in this review and in just about any music article that mentions both men. Biggie’s debut, “Ready To Die”, definitely had some elements that may not have been possible without “Illmatic”’s release six months before (the baby cover image, for starters), but presented it in a glossier, more radio-ready package-not to mention that B.I.G. was a better MC. Their subliminal war of words also resulted in one of my favorite all-time diss records, B.I.G.’s “Kick in the Door”.

As for Nas himself, he had critical adulation up the wazoo, but “Illmatic” didn’t exactly set the world on fire from a sales perspective, taking over two years to be certified Gold. While critics haven’t exactly been fair to Nas since (he had 20 years to conceptualize album #1 and a significantly shorter window to produce the rest of his work), his albums since have been…to put it mildly…inconsistent. “Illmatic” was lightning in a bottle, and times and perspectives have changed. While folks have put pressure on Nas to recreate his debut, he’s applied that pressure to himself and the results have been underwhelming and will continue to be until he finally shrugs the criticism off and makes the album he is capable of making without “Illmatic” being in the rear view mirror.

At any rate, I’ve now gone way off track. “Illmatic” is a textbook example of a young, hungry MC (let’s emphasize young here, Nas’s mind set on this album clearly places him as a 20-year old) blessed with lyrical dexterity and the good fortune to be blessed with beats produced by some of the hottest cats to ever sit behind a sampler. The result is certainly brash, occasionally ignorant, but constantly engaging. It’s legacy can be felt in the music of everyone from 50 Cent to Kanye West. Anyone looking to delve into raw, East Coast hip-hop? This is definitely one of the first places you should start. Those who call themselves rap fans? “Illmatic” is a must-have in your collection.


"Illmatic" by Nas
Released 1994 on Columbia Records
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars