Nas's Illmatic (7 page)

Until
Illmatic
, hip hop records were generally the product of one producer working with a group to implement their musical vision.
⁷
This was partially a holdover from the era where DJs/producers were the bigger stars (it’s Eric B and Rakim, not Rakim and Eric B). But hip hop’s ascent to the top of the pop charts pumped so much money into the recording process that it has made freelance producing, where beats routinely go for six figures within the a-list marketplace, seriously viable. More importantly, this kind of approach to record making was legitimized and encouraged by the response
Illmatic
received from influential tastemakers. Combining producers like those mentioned above on a single album was enough to generate major heat all by itself. Instead of viewing the album as an individual personal statement, many New York advocates thought of the record more in the way the Wu Tang described themselves on
Enter the Wu
a year earlier: a real-life Voltron,
powerful individuals that come together into one unstoppable being—only this time, Nas is the head.

Unlike modern-day major releases, however,
Illmatic’s
beats were not presented to Nas without context. In fact, as Nas would tell Vibe, with the exception of Pete Rock, whom Nas visited in his Mount Vernon home, “every other producer had come to me, to Queensbridge, to get to know me. It was like, ‘Yo, come out here with us while we run some errands, or just hang out at a girl’s house and smoke blunts, or just drink and talk.’ These were the guys that came to really feel where I was corning from.” The result was a Nas that drew on community (in the hip hop sense) talent sources to most convincingly portray an individual’s experience.

The year Nas spent recording
Illmatic
, which began with the recording of the original version of first single “It Ain’t Hard to Tell,” and ended with the last-minute switched beat on “Represent,” consisted of this effort, mixed with a lot of youthful procrastination and honing of rhymes, though little wasted tape. Despite Nas’s reputation
post-Illmatic
for leaving scores of unreleased also-ran album cuts in his wake, only one track was left off of his debut, the Large Professor-produced “I’m a Villain.”

That track starts with lines soon to be stuck in the middle of the second verse of “NY State of Mind.” The overall effect is a glance into Nas’s mindset as a man struggling with his place as an artist. Over a massive rolling bassline that could have laced your average golden-age De La Soul record, Nas lays out his case for Lex Luthor status. Then, on the second verse, he gets political.

I got beef with the president, and still loving it

Trying to make plans to overthrow the government
.

It won’t work, cause niggas don’t believe enough

They’d rather stand on the corners and receive a cuff

Around they wrist, you don’t like the sound of this

Rebel, but my country doesn’t want me

They’d rather hunt me but you’ll never catch us all

While you’re fuckin’ with the dealers we’ll be sticking up the malls

Unless you count the aimless “kidnap the president’s wife without a plan,” this is the first time Nas directly addresses the government at large. He argues against his own ability as an individual to initiate change within his community (defined in the narrowest sense as street hoods), and then uses that same inability within his own people—“they’d rather stand on the corners and receive a cuff’—against the system that is holding them down: “you’ll never catch us all.” He has efficiently shot down his individual goals and relented to his community’s anarchic power in eight bars.

Though Nas (the rapper/the person) is the individual that stands with/against social constructs in
Illmatic
, these communities are a constantly shifting, expanding, and contracting series of groups. New York hip hop heads and his own Queensbridge peers are his most direct influences, but he hardly stays local and underground on the record. After all, one song finds him owning the world. The first non-sampled words on the record come from Nas’s friend and future rapper Cormega interacting with the mainstream: “what the fuck is this bullshit on the radio, son?” Though he qualifies his audience at the beginning of “Memory Lane,” it’s hardly an exclusive club: “I rap for listeners, blunt heads, fly ladies and prisoners, Henessey holders and old school niggas.” Through it all, Nas remains in the first person.

Nas’s insular persona clashes with his universal presentation throughout the record, in even the most elementary regard; that is, after all, one child doing battle with an entire housing project for sole rights to the cover. It extends to the tracklisting as well. Though each song can sometimes seem
exclusive to New York, Queens, Queensbridge, or one block of the projects, every tide on the album has a universal connotation, or at least some other meaning related to the overall American culture:. The Genesis. N.Y. State of Mind. Life’s a Bitch. The World Is Yours. Halftime. Memory Lane. One Love. One Time 4 Your Mind. Represent. It Ain’t Hard to Tell. Rappers have made songs with rallying-cry titles like “Fuck the Police” and seemingly bizarre leftfield titles like “A Rollerskating Jam Named ‘Saturdays,’” which respectively flail around in thoughtless rebellion or jest without proper context. Each of the titles Nas uses to describe his specific experience on his specific block evokes a different but immediate association for every person that hears it, before they even press play.

Yet the album is called
Illmatic
, a word which few people had ever heard before. Like everything in his past Nas seems to have a different answer every time someone asks him about it, defining the word in many different ways, ranging from “beyond ill” or “the ultimate,” to a simple descriptive term for the music he and his crew listened to in the projects. He has often referenced a friend named Illmatic Ice who was serving time when the record was released. But one thing it seems he hasn’t pointed out is that the word had in fact been used previously on record, by Queensbridge emcee Tragedy on Marley Marl’s 1988 compilation
In Control Vol. 1
.“The rap automatical, the rhymatical,” the emcee raps, “forget ill, I get illmatical.” Nas had certainly heard the song. Not only were both of the song’s creators from Queensbridge, but Nas has often cited Tragedy as an early influence. The older emcee even recounted in one interview a story about Nas telling him that he learned to put a slash after each line by reading Tragedy’s rhymes over his shoulder as he wrote.

Still, this minor reference hardly detracts from the fact that
here was a new word being introduced to the general populace, immediately alienating a large portion of the public which must have simply felt (and still does today) that this album cannot be for them if they don’t even understand the title. He essentially achieved what Raekwon of Wu Tang would go for a year later without actually naming the record
Only Built 4 Cuban Linx
(a term for tough street-level gangsters). Of course, the irony of this—one most rappers fully understand—is that once the average individual outsider does understand these insider references, they feel like they are a part of the community. Like the music contained within it, the tide of
Illmatic
might be initially alienating for those who did not experience what Nas has experienced. But in their mind once that key is turned, like entry into an exclusive club, a simple effort will unveil an overlooked world to the patient visitor, a world other still-excluded members of their own communities will never get to see.

For most reviewers, that world was rich with vision, skill, and excitement.
Illmatic
was not a record that needed time to build to a critical consensus; here was one community that embraced the Nasty kid from Queens. After an enormous amount of buzz and features in everything from major magazines like
Vibe
to underground zines like
The Flavor, Illmatic
still managed to receive universally glowing reviews.
Rolling Stone
, still barely jumping on the hip hop bandwagon—and then, reluctantly—nevertheless had rap journalist Touré give the album four stars, calling it “a rose stretching up between cracks in the sidewalk, calling attention to its beauty, calling attention to the lack of it everywhere else.” Even
Time
magazine joined the fray, insisting to its mainstream readers that “Nas isn’t a gangsta rapper,” and “despite the subject matter, most of the songs are leisurely paced, with amiable melodies.”

The one review that mattered, however, is certainly the
one that gave out the most famous rating in hip hop history.
Illmatic
received a five mic rating from the then-untouchable
Source
magazine. Started in 1988 by David Mays and Jon Shecter, the newsletter-turned-magazine quickly became the dominant voice of hip hop journalism. Though its star has fallen about as far as it could in the past decade, the magazine was, at the time, the lone respected outlet for hip hop that was also viewed as a legitimate source (no pun intended) by true hip hop fans. It’s difficult to overestimate the impact of receiving five out of five mics, the first such rating given to any new release by the magazine since its then-editor Reginald Dennis put a moratorium on them, when evaluating the reputation of the album within the hip hop community.

The rating did not come without its share of controversy. Only two years previous, Dr. Dre’s
The Chronic
, a universally acclaimed record, received 4.5 mics, despite (no joke) essentially redefining the cultural landscape in young America. So when
Illmatic
, arguably the definition of New York hip hop, received the maximum rating, many fans who had often criticized the magazine for favoring the East Coast over the West pointed to the rating as confirmation of this bias.

But really, the bias came from one man,
Source
co-founder Jon Shecter. In a comprehensive interview with hiphopdx.com, Dennis told the story:

I only gave one 5 under my watch and it went to Nas’s
Illmatic
. It was the only time I ever broke the no 5 rule. Jon Shecter had gotten his hands on the album like eight months before it was scheduled to drop. And just like I was with
The Chronic
a few months earlier, Jon didn’t let the tape out of his sight. Not only that, but he constantly raved about it. Everyday…Everyday, Jon was like, “yo, this album is 5
mics—seriously, Reg, 5 mics. ….”

I’m just happy that
Illmatic
is universally acclaimed as a classic, so no one can accuse me of dropping the ball. But really, Jon Shecter made that call from the jump and he deserves all of the credit for his foresight.

The actual review was written by Minya Oh under the nom de plume Shorty,
⁸
and it’s a great window into the critical community’s reaction to the album. The first thing immediately noticeable about the review is that, like essentially every other review about
Illmatic
in publications like
Vibe, Spin, Rolling Stone
, and
The New York Times
, it mentions Snoop Doggy Dogg’s
Doggystyle
in the first paragraph.

Released six months before Nas’s record, the 21-year-old Snoop’s debut follow-up to his standout, frequent guest appearances on
The Chronic
had totally dominated MTV and radio (particularly the former, with the snoop-to-dog morphing video for “Who Am I? (What’s My Name?)” receiving nearly back-to-back treatment). Aside from the fact that both rappers were black men from the inner city in their early twenties who had smooth voices and a particular affinity for weed, there was little the two emcees shared. That nearly every reviewer would feel the need to contextualize their response to
Illmatic
within the frame of West Coast G-Funk is a reminder of just how pervasive the style was within the hip hop world and the music community as a whole.

But unlike other reviewers, Shorty is dismissive of
Doggystyle
, claiming “many of us in the hip hop core had our eye on a different prize—
Illmatic.”
She goes on to say, “I must maintain that this is one of the best hip hop albums I have ever heard” and “if you can’t at least appreciate the value of Nas’ poetical
realism, then you best get yourself up out of hip hop.” But she hints at the core appeal of the album in the brief 500-word review when she says,

Nas’ images remind me of personal memories and people, both passed and present…All this may sound like melodrama but it’s not just me. I’ve been hearing similar responses all over. While “Memory Lane” is my shit, my homies claim “The World is Yours,” and if you’ve got peoples doing time, then “One Love” may hit you the hardest.

This is where Nas’s personal statement—the reflection of his twenty years alive and how they have shaped his world-view—becomes the collective possession of so many different people. It’s how
Time
magazine can call
Illmatic
a “wake up call to his listeners” while a review in the Oliver Wang-edited
Classic Material
can call it “nihilistic.”

Nas’s reality was full of the tireless struggle against systemic power. There is a constant police presence on the record and a picture of housing police in the CD’s liner notes. His years-long search for a record contract was the mission of one rapper hoping to be heard by the massive, seemingly faceless music industry. There’s also a struggle against a higher power, fighting to survive, fighting for meaning. On “One Love,” he’s even fighting against his home, struggling for his sanity:

So I be ghost from my projects

Take my pen and pad for the week and hittin’ L’s while I’m sleeping

A two-day stay, you may say I need the time alone

To relax my dome, no phone, left the 9 at home.

You see the streets have me stressed something terrible

Fuckin’ with the corners have a nigga up in Bellevue

And that’s where Nas finds his ultimate internal struggle on
Illmatic
, because the album finds Nas in a position where he must choose between defining himself as the individual he desires to be and staying true to the community that nurtured him and made him the man he was on the day the record was released. The conflict between Nas’s perception of himself and the world’s, whether it be hip hop’s world, journalism’s world, or America’s world, is essentially insignificant to an artist like Nas. But his internal conflict, that of a man who must fight to define his individuality on his own terms, is created by the pressures of those worlds.