Nas, Illmatic
Featured Album
A timeless, unimpeachable rap classic
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's clear that it might as well have been a thousand. "Niggas don't listen, man," he sighs wearily while his crowing buddies count cash behind him. At 23, he 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.
