Authors: Matthew Gasteier
For Nas, surrounded by hip hop, there must have seemed little that was revolutionary in becoming an emcee. Yet the power he has said he feels behind the microphone bestows upon him enormous responsibility. It’s conceivable that when he says he doesn’t know how to start this shit, the shit he could have been talking about is a revolution, musically and politically.
Breaking with tradition artistically is a major aspect of Nas’s reality of growing up and becoming an adult. His choice to become an artist and express himself is just as important to understanding his journey as what he is saying. It’s why even
when Nas struggles on the record, he seems to have already succeeded, to have somehow broken free from the chains that bound him. This seismic shift Nas finds within himself on
Illmatic
is contrasted by the meaningless endings and cyclical rise-and-fall American epics that surround him.
Yet it is hard to know if Nas genuinely believes he has achieved this goal or if it is merely a fantasy he brings to life through his on-record persona. Just as rappers present themselves as invincible to bullets and bitches, does Nas feel he is impervious to the vicious cycle of his neighborhood only when he is in a position to brag? With hindsight as a guide, the answer is a resounding no, since Nas did, after all, escape his mapped-out destiny. But at the time, all he had was his powerful faith to guide him.
Certainly his persona on the record, contradictory in itself, has multiple sides to it. Two songs on the album, “One Time 4 Your Mind” and “Represent,” display the Nas persona in the most vivid detail. On these songs, Nas is an active participant in his fate, interacting with the world around him and not just leaning out his window for the bird’s eye view, safe behind the metaphorical lens.
“One Time 4 Your Mind” is the more traditional of the two, at its core more reminiscent of a Beach Boys song than an NWA song. The first verse is casual teenage rebellion. With a laid-back stunted delivery, Nas tells the story of an average day spent drinking beer, watching movies, getting high, and having sex. He listens to music and battles emcees. It’s all harmless fun. This is where he has been, it’s what he knows, and it’s what he enjoys. It’s all he seems to want in life.
Unlike other songs on the record, Nas does little observing in the verse. Most people are responding to him and his decisions. In “N.Y. State of Mind,” where he shoots up a crowd, Nas’s actions have much bigger repercussions. Yet he seems
far more removed than he does on “One Time 4 Your Mind”, recounting insignificance and routine.
At its basic nature, the song is about surviving—or more accurately maintaining. Nas’s relationship with the world isn’t nihilistic, but he does seem aimless. Were Nas to make “One Time 4 Your Mind” now, the song might come off as depressing, a pathetic grasp at youthful indiscretion. Surrounded by the cocky verbal displays and, to a large portion of his audience, other worldly accounts of this then-teenager’s ‘hood, “One Time 4 Your Mind” is uniquely relatable because it displays the universal uncertainty at a specific moment in every adolescent’s life, the time when rejection of the familiar looms large. Nas has recognized his reality and begun to understand and quantify his own talents. But he has yet to decide to do anything with them, to break free of the life he was given and take a chance on the unknown.
“Represent,” on the other hand, is a different Nas, the angry, violent, desperate Nas. This persona comes from tradition as well, but the tradition of death and destruction that Nas has seen take too many of his peers. He puts his listener inside the Queensbridge perspective in the first verse:
The streets is filled with undercovers, homicide chasin’ brothers
The D’s on the roof tryin’ to watch us and knock us
And killer coppers even come through in helicopters
It’s a war zone he describes, where the enemy comes at you from all sides. It is a violent struggle, but it’s hardly a revolution of which he speaks; this is business as usual. The only thing it seems he can do is strike out and make his mark in any way he can. In “One Time 4 Your Mind,” casual sex, weed smoking, and rhyme battling are simple things, the youthful indiscretions that come with a lack of direction and
responsibility. On “Represent,” they’re turned into weapons against the system that oppresses, “cause life ain’t shit but stress fake niggas and crab stunts/so I guzzle my Hennesey while pullin’ on mad blunts.” Instead of maintaining that “crime couldn’t beat a rhyme,” the Nas of “Represent” thinks “the rap game reminds me of the crack game.” Here, to the Nas portrayed in this song, is how to “represent,” how to live “the real fuckin’ life.”
“Represent” is quite possibly the most place-specific of all of the songs on
Illmatic
, the song where Nas mentions his block, the 40 side of Vernon, in the outro, and gives shout-outs to his crew in the final verse. “Memory Lane” and “N.Y. State of Mind” delve into the experience of growing up in the projects, but “Represent” is most focused on Nas’s existence, his tight-knit universe where “we all stare at the out-of-towners” and time is measured by noting “before the BDP conflict with MC Shan.” It’s this contained history, his personal heritage, that presents him with that final choice to press on in the context of what he knows, or leave it behind by choosing something different for himself.
These back-to-back songs portray the two public sides of the early Nas persona (or, for that matter, early hip hop): the everyday character that is just trying to get by and have fun doing it, and the frustrated, unpredictable Nas that is stuck on his corner and trying to survive. They are natural reactions to the pressure Nas experienced growing up in Queensbridge, but they are also, as contradictory as they may seem, instantly recognizable in the natural progression of maturity.
Illmatic
might seem limited in its scope to a small four- or five-block radius, but from the specific comes the universal. The contradictions of the album exist everywhere, and the honesty and specificity of them rings true on a universal level because people recognize their own truth in other peoples’
truths. Nas’s human struggle is the struggle of a teenager stepping into manhood, an artist coming into his own, and an oppressed citizen breaking free from his chains. These individual triumphs mirror the triumphs of the community, just as their youthful ambitions reflect the collective experience. When it is done properly, the personal can be applied indiscriminately.
The man that Nas became on
Illmatic
would seem fearless if he wasn’t so often open about his doubts. His artistic output might seem miraculous if he didn’t so frequently offer a window into his process. But he does these things because Nas is nothing if not honest and open as an artist, and this vulnerability leads fans to relate to him in ways they cannot with similar rappers. It’s hard to imagine following in the footsteps of Biggie and Jay when listening to
Ready to Die
or
Reasonable Doubt
. Their personas are kings, unstoppable legends on the street, the 80s action-movie stars to Nas’s flawed independent-film protagonist. The later debuts seem more in line with the traditional gangster persona, the NWA soldier/heroes that listeners viewed with awe and respect. Nas’s revolution is in refusing to glorify or demonize, instead creating a realistic—and therefore sympathetic and universally recognizable—autobiographical portrait.
This is not just a representation of the tradition of street-level reporting within hip hop that has seen its days come and go.
Illmatic
stands as the most cogent argument for a non-judgmental depiction of violence in hip hop. While most artists either glorify and/or exaggerate the violence they have experienced or take a measured and consistent stand against the destruction of their communities, Nas—perhaps more than any other emcee—displays on
Illmatic
the effectiveness of using violence as a narrative tool to accurately portray a very real and urgent situation within an other wise invisible
community. It is, of course, easy to find negative and senseless portrayals of violence in mainstream hip hop, instances without excuse. But
Illmatic
is an undeniable argument for the social significance (and responsibility) of realistic depictions of violence within hip hop. This depiction could ideally provide a map forward for a genre that is struggling to retain its tradition of realism without shirking its responsibilities as a representative of the inner city.
There is an idea that art can change the world. If this means that people who experience that art would immediately set out to right the wrongs that have been done, then hip hop has seemingly failed. Violent crime in the inner-cities, particularly in places like Philadelphia, is going up, the number of people below the poverty line is growing, and black people in this country are now as pessimistic as they were twenty years ago, at the height of the crack epidemic, about their ability to succeed in America. Instead of highlighting the problems of the communities that produced it in order to effect change, hip hop has become, for the majority of mainstream America, the representation of those very problems.
But records like
Illmatic
have shed light on corners of the nation that go ignored in the conventional media, and they do so in a way that is not depressing or preachy, but invigorating and redemptive. The message of salvation speaks not just to the average corner kid who “loves committin’ sins,” but to America’s long-held belief in a second chance. It reaches every demographic in the country and informs their perspective of America, instilling with particular intensity the notion of that ultimate contradiction in this nation, that we are comprised of individuals who can make anything of themselves that they want, and yet we are bound together by history and social and political barriers that stifle that dream.
Once this contradiction is recognized, it does not seem so hard to understand where Nas’s persona comes from, and how easily it can shift and bend at will. Nor does it seem unlikely to imagine that all of those kids who do understand that contradiction, no matter where they come from and how easily they personally can achieve the American dream, would have a perspective on their country that is far different from their parents’. This is the true revolution of hip hop, the one that has yet to play itself out.
Whether or not it does succeed is up to the same process that Nas goes through on
Illmatic
. It’s a question of maturation, and the evolution of the individual’s perception of the world. As “the essence of adolescence” leaves their bodies, will reality set in and destroy the hope for a better tomorrow? Just as
Illmatic
ultimately calls for redemption and evolution, its audience must choose between suffering the same jaded fate as previous generations or retaining the promise and resolve of their youth.
Hip hop is a microphone, a camera, and a stage for the unheard millions in America and around the world. But first and foremost it must be a musical art form. If this is easy to forget with an album like
Illmatic
, it is because, again and at every step, the record plays so strongly into (or has defined?) the conventional hip hop narrative. Nas is the center of focus, the powerful voice of strength and direction that his musical backbone supports but never controls. The beats are the nerve endings to his brain cells.
Because the music itself is rarely examined as closely as the lyrics, there is a real impression that hip hop has yet to gain full recognition as a credible musical genre. When arguing against that lack of respect, many advocates point to records like The Roots’
Phrenology
, Outkast’s
Aquemini
, and Kanye West’s recent collaboration with Jon Brion on L
ate Registration
as proof that hip hop has become the leading innovator among musical genres over the past decade, and its music should receive at least the same amount of attention as the lyrics.
However, while records like those mentioned are all powerful musical statements, they are essentially hybrid records that gain recognition because of their already established genre touchstones. The musical accomplishments on
Illmatic
, a record that displays the most fundamental sonic characteristics of true hip hop, are in fact more impressive, and more indicative of the need not to ignore the breaks behind the flows.
Hip hop music stems from a few basic concepts, but, as countless imitators and failed experiments have proven, it is deceptively simple. A genre that originated out of a lack of resources to produce the kind of music a community was hungry for became a worldwide phenomenon because a generation’s worth of artists took those building blocks and made something incredible out of them. What follows is a track-by-track account of the making of what Pete Rock, one of the most important of those artists, calls “the perfect example of real hip hop music.”
The intro to
Illmatic
begins with an extended sound clip from
Wild Style
, the cult classic that was the first significant hip hop film. It’s not just the dialogue that is borrowed: the subway rumbling at the beginning and the hard-hitting drums that kick in and lead back to Nas are all directly lifted from the film, including “Subway Theme,” the song created for the film by DJ Grand Wizard Theodore and Chris Stein of the pop group Blondie.
First and foremost, the use of the sample immediately set the album up as an authentic hip hop audio document. “The only thing I had never heard when the album came out was the intro,” says DJ Premier of listening to the record all the way through for the first time. “And even that, I mean, to use
Wild
Style
is a
big deal
. But he comes from that era where he knows about
Wild Style
, he’s seen the movie and he respects that. That’s one of the best movies to ever showcase true MCing and DJing and B-Boying and graffiti from the very purest form of this culture. That’s the first day of school’s homework.”