Six Degrees of "Illmatic"

The very first thing you hear on Illmatic is the lonely sound of a subway train rolling over the tracks and disappearing into the distance. It's followed by the faint sound of young Nasir Jones's very first on-record appearance, on Main Source's "Live at the Barbeque." The "Barbeque" verse made clear that this kid was A) excitable, and B) very eager to make an impression: before his 32 bars are over, he has dubbed himself a "police murderer"; kidnapped the president's wife "without a plan,"; compared himself to the Ku Klux Klan; and confessed that he "went to hell for snuffing Jesus" (when he was twelve). As far as ear-grabbing first appearances go, it's pretty serious stuff, right up there with Busta Rhymes's jack-in-the-box verse on "Scenario."

But here it's just background music, prelude. Only two years have passed since "Live At the Barbeque," but from the first moments Nas's voice enters on "The Genesis," it becomes clear that it might as well have been a thousand. "Niggas don't listen, man," he sighs wearily as his crowing buddies count cash on the table. At 23, Nas had already become the oldest soul in the room, and Illmatic is a document of every single thing that soul has seen. In one long, deep breath, Nas unfolds all of 1980s New York City — "The ghetto is like a maze, full of black rats, trapped" — with himself rattling around inside, neither the hero nor the anti-hero, just the observer. Illmatic is a life's work — a life — in eleven songs, and it's no wonder Nas will never top it. It can't be topped. He can title his late-period albums as many controversial things that he wants, but Illmatic will reverberate forever beyond him, for it is a reinvention of New York rap, an unimpeachable poetic document, a timeless bildungsroman, and a source of more ill rhymes than almost all other rap albums ever recorded combined. You may recoil at gangsta rap's nihilism, it's zero-sum view of life, it's anger and darkness, but if you have any desire to know anything about hip-hop, than you must own this.

Jay-Z and Nas have always struck me as squabbling brothers, each one taking turns yelling "stop copying me!" at the other. "Yeah, I sampled your voice...you was using it wrong," Jay-Z blustered on "The Takeover." Good line, but it doesn't erase the simple fact: Illmatic was first, and yeah, Jay-Z's Reasonable Doubt wouldn't have existed in any way, shape or form without it — loathe as he was to admit it, Illmatic was Jay-Z's blueprint years before The Blueprint. Illmatic's imprint is everywhere on this album — from the self-mythologizing opening montage to the bleak ghetto storytelling of "D'Evils" echoing that of "One Love." And Nas, though he never quite scaled the commercial heights of his more excitable little bro, never let Jigga forget who was first — even as he secretly tried on a shiny red suit in the mirror in the late '90s, wondering privately if he could replicate little bro's success. Back and forth, to and fro, duck season, rabbit season, these two have been giving each other noogies ever since — though ironically, they both share the unfortunate distinction of masterpiece debuts they never quite matched.

The crack-devastated ghettos of late-'80s/early '90s Queens were bleak and awful places, to be sure, and Nas certainly didn't shy away on Illmatic from observing their ravages, telling us of kids with guns "who probably couldn't see as high as I be." But he also found room for "Halftime," where he yelled out "Check me out, y'all," and kicked some lighthearted backyard-barbecue raps for his friends about his skills, his chain, and his shoes (he apparently has "more kicks than a baby in a mother's stomach," which, you know — that's a lot of kicks). For Prodigy and Havoc of Mobb Deep, however, there was no respite from misery, no room for leavening humor or joy. "There's a war going on outside no man is safe from," Havoc claimed early on in The Infamous, and that served as the record's statement of theme — The Infamous is one long pitch-black night of the soul, perhaps the most bone-chilling document of gangsta-rap's soul-dead nihilism put on record, all the more frightening for its numbed, flat tone.

Each of these records hit with a different, but equally Big Bang-sized, impact: when Illmatic arrived, it felt like the Second Coming; Jay-Z wandered onto the scene with a white suit and an overly casual demeanor, hip-hop's Jay Gatsby; Dre and Snoop, on The Chronic, were the definitive party crashers. Enter the 36 Chambers, meanwhile, happened with the force and suddenness of a violent coup. "PLO-STYLE!!!" Ghostface yelled on "Bring the Ruckus"— and he wasn't fucking kidding. "Ruckus," one of the most aggressively unhinged opening tracks in hip-hop history, kicked off a record that, quite simply, redefined what "rugged and raw" could mean. How rugged were you? Well, GZA was "more rugged than slave-man boots." Think you're raw? Inspectah Deck was "raw like cocaine straight from Bolivia." RZA's scrap-metal kung-fu masterpieces kept pace — the drums hit like backfiring Hooptees, the aggression was wild-eyed and free-flowing, and the conviction was staggering — you can almost hear the spittle flecks spraying the mic booth. These Staten Island roughnecks made Nas, a guy who crawled "straight up out the fuckin' dungeons of rap," look like a bookish street poet.

As you can tell by young Nasir Jones's iconic thousand-yard stare on the album cover, Illmatic is largely a clear-eyed, sober affair — two adjectives that decidedly do not apply to the good Dr. Dre and his young compatriot Snoop Doggy Dogg. As far as game-changing debuts go, The Chronic was part clusterbomb and part Whoopee Cushion. The Chronic skimps on none of the despair, violence, or hopelessness that Nas chronicled sorrowfully from his project window — but Dre and Snoop aren't documentarians, they're vaudevillians. Taking equal inspiration from George Clinton records, Redd Foxx comedy albums, and blaxploitation flicks, Dre transformed the war zone of Central L.A. into a place where cartoon superheroes roamed the Earth. The Play-Doh fun-factory synths of "Fuck Wit Dre Day (And Everybody's Celebratin')" — which surely wins some award for most mindblowing use of the parenthetical ever — were surrounded by high-pitched little giggling voices and the sort of playground taunts that might strike a seventh-grader as lowbrow. And as far as all-time great introductory lines on a record go, Snoop Doggy Dogg's self-introduction: "Bow-wow-wow, yippee-yo, yippee-yay, Doggy Dogg's in the motherfuckin.....HOOOOOOUSE," is right up there with Nas's "Rappers I monkey-flip em with the funky rhythm I be kickin/Musician inflicting composition of pain" for sheer indelibility and condensed statement of purpose.

This one might seem weird. But any way you slice it, jazz looms large over Illmatic; Nas's father is jazz trumpeter Olu Dara, yes, but also, nearly all of the production on Illmatic digs deeply into jazz crates, whether it's the guitar plinks that open "NY State of Mind" (taken from a session Donald Byrd cut for Blue Note), or the sepia-toned piano chords Pete Rock chops up for "The World Is Yours" (those are from jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal's "I Love Music"). But why Mingus? And why Mingus Ah Um?

Well, for innumerable reasons. But primarily, Mingus Ah Um and Illmatic are both essential documents of their genre. More than that, they are exactly the same kind of essential genre document, the kind that sums up everything vital the genre has been while also tugging it inexorably forward into the future, dragging everyone else along with you into a new world you have created, and that everyone else, from that point onward, has to live in. Illmatic and Mingus Ah Um didn't just come out, they happened, to both rap and jazz, and not coincidentally, they both arrived fully formed. Nas said many of the things on Illmatic on subsequent records, but never as clearly; similarly, while Mingus would go on to arguably even greater heights with The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady and others, Ah Um remains maybe the most vivid summation of his powers for both longtime connoisseurs and for the new generation of fans born every year.