Authors: Matthew Gasteier
It is easy when telling a musician’s story to settle into the conventional narrative. Most of these narratives rely far too much on the origin story. We believe, as a collective audience, that somewhere in an artist’s past is the answer to his talents, the true meaning of his work. Hip hop, because of its obsession with the “before” picture of its stars, depends almost entirely on the origin story. This is, perhaps, why hip hop and comic books go so well together: each depends upon an emotional and life-altering ordeal to create true heroes. So
Superman’s exploding planet and Batman’s murdered parents don’t seem so different (metaphorically) from murdered friends and bullets in the jaw.
The story of
Illmatic
just happens to lend itself particularly well to the conventional narrative, not just because Nas grew up in such an important and oft-referenced place, but because the album is essentially about his beginnings. To judge a book by its cover, here is a seven-year-old Nas, superimposed with a picture of Queensbridge; one reviewer said it was as if he literally and metaphorically had the projects on his mind. More likely, he was merging the two images because they were, in his mind, one and the same. Nas was Queensbridge itself, and now he was introducing it to the world, moving product that had been created by years of living out the real-life hip hop origin story.
It’s impossible to know whether Nas would have achieved the same level of success corning out of Brooklyn rather than Queensbridge, a community that gave him a wealth of knowledge in just two decades of life. Certainly such a talent couldn’t have gone undeveloped, but the natural persona Nas presents with an objective eye and a steady pen are at the very least as much nurture as nature. With his performance on “Live at the BBQ,” a very young emcee had proven skilled and experienced well beyond his years. The Bridge was far from over.
By the early nineties, New York hip hop was on its last legs. Public Enemy was mired in controversy after Professor Griff’s anti-semitic remarks clouded the release of the classic
Fear of a Black Planet
. Early pioneers like Eric B. and Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, and Run DMC were fading out of public consciousness. The only New York sound gaining any significant mainstream traction seemed to be the Native Tongues’ jazzy and smooth take on the genre, crystalized in A Tribe Called Quest’s
The Low End Theory
, released in 1991.
That year, around the same time MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice reached the top of the charts, NWA released their long-awaited follow-up to their influential and politically charged
Straight Outta Compton
. Named backwards as
Efil4Zaggin
for obvious reasons, the album was the group’s extreme and surrealistic attempt to carry on without their most accomplished lyricist, Ice Cube, who had only recently parted ways and decided to work with Public Enemy’s production team, the Bomb Squad, on his solo debut,
AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted
.
NWA’s album was also the first major hip hop record to be released in the brave new world created by Soundscan. Because of the new automated reporting system, Billboard no longer had to rely on reports from music stores to find out exactly how much every record sold. The result was a shocking number-one debut for an album studded with gang rape, frustrated and confrontational violence, and some of the darkest beats and rhymes ever to top the charts, before or since. Quite simply, until that point, no one had known how much money was in Gangsta Rap.
The album’s surprise success set the stage for producer Dr. Dre’s solo debut the next year.
The Chronic’s
mix of smooth choruses and confrontational lyrics was instantly heralded as the new sound of hip hop, and come late ’92, early ’93, there was hardly any room for the east coast in the G-Funk landscape. Certain acts were able to attain moderate success, like Redman, Onyx, and Fu-Schnickens, but outside of hardcore hip hop circles, most New York acts went unheard and completely unrecognized.
Nas was having trouble himself. Most artists view a certain level of exposure as the step towards perpetual success: that guest-starring role on
Law and Order
one day, an Oscar the next. But after his guest appearance on “Live at the BBQ” garnered a little buzz, the harsh realities of the music industry started to sink in. Despite shopping homemade demos around town, Nas was largely MIA in the hip hop community. Still barely known outside his small group of acquaintances, he was seemingly back to square one on his chosen career path. As MC Serch told rap magazine
Grandslam
in 2003, “he was an enigma in hip hop. No one knew how to get in touch with him.”
Serch rose to fame with 3
rd
Bass, the legendary group best known for featuring one of the first interracial lineups. Like
Eminem later, the group would go after any white (and therefore fair game) rappers they could find to skewer, beginning feuds first with the Beastie Boys (over a beef inherited when they arrived at Def Jam) and then with Vanilla Ice, legitimately if obviously accusing him of stealing and watering down Black culture. However, also like Eminem, Serch was an unusually talented lyricist whose abilities stretched beyond his often comical persona and subject matter. He also had an enormous amount of respect for the craftsmanship and skill required to excel in front of the microphone, so when he heard “Live at the BBQ,” he wanted to meet Nas. “That verse is still one of my favorite verses of all time,” says the emcee over a decade later. “It wasn’t only me, I think everyone wanted to get in touch with him.”
Before he could, the Queensbridge emcee, struggling to make inroads at the various New York labels, suffered a major loss. Nearly a year after his debut with Main Source, on May 23, 1992, Nas’s brother Jungle was shot and his best friend and frequent collaborator, Will “Ill Will” Graham, was murdered. Graham had been attending a party where he was supposedly disrespecting a young girl. When the girl called her friends to come defend her, things escalated, and Graham was shot in the back.
It was a defining moment for Nas, on the cusp of fame, hoping to make his way into the world at large and defy the odds to which Graham would succumb. In ’94, Nas was interviewed in the pioneering hip hop mag
Rap Pages
by Bobbito, the legendary radio DJ. Bobbito (aka Robert Garcia) had passed on Nas while working A&R at Def Jam because he didn’t think the young rapper, still struggling to break through and make rap a career, was ready. By the time of the interview, Bobbito and Nas had a mutual respect that allowed Nas to feel comfortable to speak freely. Nas’s reflections on Graham
during the interview are a rare personal take on the tragedy from a public figure who is Notonously private:
X equals unknown. I can’t even build on that, that shit is deep. A nigga been with you all your life, since you was young. I grew up in my man Will’s crib. He used to have a big speaker. He’d play records like “White Lines”—that bass line, he’d slow it up and we’d rhyme. He’d cut it up. We used to listen to Awesome Two, Chuck Chillout on 98.7, Mr. Magic on BLS, all the old-school shit. As we heard rappers come out and progress, in our own little world we was making tapes for only us to listen to. As the years went by, we had like little albums, so we was progressing right along with them. Will was my DJ, but he used to rhyme. He used to do everyone’s style that you hear now. He used to just bug and rhyme like B-Real, start wylin’ like Onyx, then slow it up like Rakim. He had crazy styles off the top of his head. I was the one who would sit down and write, so it took me longer “to come up with shit, but we were making tapes. You grow up, we slinging, making a little bit of cash, just the average shit. He got locked up, then he came home and we was blowing up again. Then, boom, the nigga’s gone. I had these pictures of how shit would be when he grew up. How shit would fall into place. The cipher is incomplete now, cuz my man is gone. Even though he’s under, I’m still standing – that’s understanding. Now I go to his crib and his moms is there, and I just feel him. Something that he left there. I look at his clothes, his equipment, his turntables, and I can feel him. So it’s still there. I’m gonna represent and keep it real.
There are few Americans outside of the inner city that, at 20 years old, are confronted with violent death among peers.
According to the Department of Justice, in 1992, the year Graham was murdered, black people were nearly ten times as likely to be victims of homicide as white people. Based on murder rates in the late 90s, when violent crime was at a relatively low point, 15-year-old black males in Washington, D.C. had a staggering 1 in 12 chance of being murdered by the time they were 45, while white males during the same time frame had a probability of 1 in 345. Even black teenage males in neighboring Brooklyn, with the lowest inner-city murder rate in the country, had a 1 in 53 chance of being murdered.
These statistics are well-known but rarely understood, particularly in discussions of hip hop that take place outside of the environment in which they are more than numbers and concepts. Most cursory coverage of the music in the main-stream press is limited to the cavalier attitude with which death and murder is treated, ironically (but not coincidentally) mirroring the style of hip hop which receives the most attention from mainstream outlets such as commercial radio stations, MTV, and major record labels. This forms a simplistic narrative about “gangsta rap” with which to damn the entire genre, while simultaneously wrapping it up in a neat, rebellion-ready starter kit for the young masses. But the real, more complex story is one of serious but understandable contradiction. While there is certainly a great deal of violent and masculine posturing in hip hop, it is balanced with a deep reverence for the dead, the constant presence of those who have passed, and a strong if commercially muted commitment to ending the cycle of violence.
This seeming hypocrisy is one of the fundamental building blocks of hip hop. Some rappers faced with the violent culture forced upon them and their neighbors take to extremes. Legendary rapper KRS-One, who spearheaded the hip hop-based Stop the Violence Movement, began his career with
his group Boogie Down Production’s debut record
Criminal Minded
. The album included the track “9mm Goes Bang,” with the line “He reached for his pistol but it was just a waste/‘Cause my 9 millimeter was up against his face/He pulled his pistol anyway and I filled him full of lead.” Just an album later, faced with the murder of his DJ/Producer Scott La Rock, KRS released
By Any Means Necessary
, with the single “Stop the Violence.” More often, usually driven by the threat of lost record sales and radio play, rappers refuse to learn from these events and furiously hold on to the hyper-violent persona of the successful ghetto superstar.
Nas walks the thin line between the two extremes. He can speak passionately about his fallen comrades, and yet on record, he might write a song where he receives a call about the location of an enemy and then goes to hunt him down and kill him. But even more mystifying is the casual violence matched up with the destruction it causes in one song. On “NY State of Mind,” Nas describes in first person shooting up his opponents: “Lead was hitting niggas, one ran, I made him backflip.” But this soldier-like narration drains of confidence in the next line when he realizes his actions have consequences: “Heard a few chicks scream, my arm shook, couldn’t look.” To the listener, this lack of omniscient judgment is confusing. Nas has put himself in the first person in his story, and created a situation in which he is doing something he seems to regret.
But the point of Nas’s work is not to judge, but to represent. Often associated with gangs or a neighborhood, representing is used in the literal sense in the case of
Illmatic
. There is little perspective on the record because there is no room to stand back in Nas’s Queensbridge. On the song “Represent” he opens by saying, “Straight up shit is real and any day could be your last in the jungle.” This is simply a depiction of the only life the rapper knows.
For attentive listeners, this is the best way to gain insight into the experience. From Biggie admitting “sometimes I hear death knocking at my front door” to Talib Kweli talking about “cities where making 21’s a big accomplishment,” rappers have taken the place of reporters who have long ago moved on to fresher and more popular stories. When Nas says “I woke early on my born day, I’m 20, it’s a blessing/the essence of adolescence leaves my body now I’m fresh and/my physical frame is celebrated cause I made it/one quarter through life, some Godly like thing created,” he’s not just happy it’s his birthday.
For these artists, the paradox is not their warring affinity towards violence and revulsion of its impact—which are simply two sides of their overall reality—but their very survival. The culture of guns and death is their existence, and they know better than anyone their chances of making it out alive. As Nas’s once-rival Jay-Z said, “this is the life I chose, or rather the life that chose me.” Their only choice is to hope to be the last one standing. In this sense, rappers who rap about death while preaching against violence are not walking contradictions, but existential contradictions, in that they are still walking.
It’s not the triumph of his own survival or the numerous shout-outs to his fallen friend over the course of
Illmatic
that have the most impact on the listener. The album is packed with the paranoid, desperate, harrowing experiences of an average resident trying to last another day. There’s the stomping claustrophobia of “N.Y. State of Mind,” where he maintains “I never sleep, ‘cause sleep is the cousin of death,” and “One Love’s” emotional confession of a frustrated man telling his incarcerated friend “it kinda makes me want to murder, for real-a/I’ve even got a mask and gloves to bust slugs for one love.” The struggle portrayed is the seemingly endless and unwinnable race against the inevitability of death.
Instead of bogging him down, the constant reminder of death seems to have made Nas more resolute. AZ, in his guest appearance on “Life’s a Bitch,” says as much about the quest for survival: “even though we know somehow we all gotta go/but as long as we leavin’ thievin’ we’ll be leavin’ with some kinda dough, so/until that day we expire and turn to vapors/me and my capers, will be somewhere stackin’ plenty papers/keeping it real, packing steel gettin’ high/‘cause life’s a bitch and then you die.” It’s in stark contrast to Nas’s pensive and somber description of sitting in his friend’s room, surrounded by all of his things, frustrated by a future that will never come. Yet even then he thinks of representing—his hood, his friends, his talents—and keeping it real. “He’s under, I’m still standing.” Violence and a call for peace, lost friends and passing time, death and survival. Without each, there would be no understanding.