Illmatic

Released on April 19th 1994, Nas’ début album Illmatic remains one of the most articulate and well produced Hip-Hop albums of all time. Aged just twenty when Columbia Records unleashed the Queensbridge rapper’s forty minute masterpiece, it is often forgotten with the path his career has since taken, what a brilliant record this is.

Opening track ‘N.Y. State of Mind’ is a blistering exploration of life from the point of view of a young black male growing up in the notorious Queensbridge Houses project, home to over 6,000 across its North and South Houses. Set to DJ Premier’s exquisite beat, sampling Joe Chambers’ Mind Rain

and Donald Byrd’s Flight Time and combining them in his unmistakeable style to provide a jazz-fuelled foundation for Nas’ multi-syllabic internal rhyme patterns and topped off with a scratched sample from Eric B. & Rakim’s Mahogany, this remains one of my all-time favourite Hip-Hop tracks as Nas takes us on a journey through Queens that makes no apologies for the honest description of the life that his peers typically experience.

 

“I got so many rhymes I don’t think I’m too sane 

Life is parallel to Hell but I must maintain

and be prosperous, though we live dangerous

cops could just arrest me, blamin us, we’re held like hostages

It’s only right that I was born to use mics

and the stuff that I write, is even tougher than dice

I’m takin’ rappers to a new plateau, through rap slow 

My rhymin’ is a vitamin, held without a capsule 

The smooth criminal on beat breaks

Never put me in your box if your shit eats tapes”

DJ Premier has previously pointed out that when you hear Nas say “I don’t know where to start this shit” that this was due to the song being freshly written and paired with the beat for the first time when recorded, something that by being left on the final edit of the track only further displays Nas’ brilliant timing and delivery which has easily earned recognition for its truly poetic quality.

This next video has been recovered from all the way back in 1994 and was the promotional video put together by Columbia Records to promote the LP, which despite starting strong (selling 59,000 copies in its first week) failed to live up to sales expectations, finally gaining Platinum status in 2001. A curious mixture of interviews with the man himself, his stellar production team (Q-Tip, DJ Premier, Large Professor and Pete Rock) and the residents of ‘The Bridge’, this promo video is an interesting insight to Nas’ ‘street dweller’ days before fame catapulted him far away from the projects he grew up on.

Having broken onto the scene after meeting Large Professor of Main Source and then landing a verse on their track Live at the Barbeque

in 1991, the first single to be released from Illmatic was the Large Professor produced Halftime which hit shelves under Nasir Jones’ original alias ‘Nasty Nas’ in October of 1992, allowing for more than a year of hype leading up to Illmatic’s release. Little did the rest of the world know that around a similar time a certain Christopher Wallace was beginning to put together one of the decades other classic Hip-Hop albums, the unmistakeable Ready to Die. That said, it was Nas who got his release out first and thus (if indeed only momentarily) became the toast of the East Coast scene although it could be argued that Biggie’s Ready to Die dropping just a month after Illmatic (and storming the charts in the process) may have been a key reason for the album not having the commercial success expected, that said, for me it has no bearing on what an important and brilliant record it is.

The video that I will leave you with is the final song from the album It Ain’t Hard to Tell, another fine example of Jones’ smooth and tricky lyricism paired up with a brilliantly arranged Large Professor beat which samples Michael Jackson’s Human Nature perfectly. A confident affirmation of his talents, It Ain’t Hard to Tell sees Nas shift focus away from the life and experiences of the Queensbridge projects and allow himself to fantasize about his calling in life and the carefree existence it promises him. The final verse testament to the effortless style displayed through the entire record;

 

“This rhythmatic explosion, is what your frame of mind has chosen

I’ll leave your brain stimulated, niggaz is frozen

Speak with criminal slang, begin like a violin

End like Leviathan, its deep well let me try again

Wisdom be leakin’ out my grapefruit troop

I dominate break loops, givin mics men-e-straul cycles

Street’s disciple, I rock beats that’s mega trifle

And groovy but smoother than moves by Villanova

You’re still a soldier; I’m like Sly Stallone in Cobra

Packin’ like a rasta in the weed spot

Vocals’ll squeeze glocks, MC’s eavesdrop

Though they need not to sneak

My poetry’s deep, I never fell

Nas’raps should be locked in a cell

It ain’t hard to tell…” 

It is a fitting end to one of the finest début albums to be released in my lifetime although I always wonder what could have been if Jones could have reproduced the same glorious mixture of killer beats with raw, real life inspired rhymes in his future albums. I like to think however, that this was somewhat of a perfect storm, with Nas and the incredible individuals he worked with on this album all meeting each other whilst at the very top of their games. For those of you who are not incredibly familiar with this thirty nine minutes and forty one seconds of Hip-Hop history, I can only recommend that you waste little more time in getting familiar.