Looking back on Illmatic, 25 years later

Hip-hop sounded a little different in 1994.

Much of mainstream America was still hesitant to accept hip-hop as the cultural behemoth it would eventually become, leaving the genre’s pioneers on the fringes of major media outlets even as the movement began to swell. The West Coast’s signature G-Funk sound had shifted the dynamic of power, featuring charismatic stars in the making such as Snoop Dogg and N.W.A. As the birthplace of hip-hop, New York was the furthest thing from irrelevant in the national landscape, but still, there was a feeling that the city needed a new king to answer the imminent surge on the opposite side of the country.

Enter a 19 year old emcee born Nasir Jones, who burst onto the scene in 1991 with a head-turning feature on Main Source’s Live at the BBQ. As word began to spread that Nas’ debut album Illmatic was on the horizon, New Yorkers alike soon looked to him as the potential spark plug to bring the city back to the forefront of the genre.

There was so much expectation for kid from Queensbridge, said Greg Kot, a longtime music critic at the Chicago Tribune. It was nuts. I think part of it was that he was from a musical family; his father was obviously a very accomplished musician. But I also think there was a lot of rooted interest among the New York community, there was a feeling that New York needed [Nas] to reclaim its place.

Even the way he assembled his tremendously anticipated debut was a break from the norm. At the time, the standard was to link with a single producer for an entire body of work, synthesizing a sound and an energy that would join the entire tracklist together. Nas chose a different route, instead recruiting some of the biggest names in the game to help craft his sound.

Large Professor. Pete Rock. DJ Premiere. Q-Tip. Landing just one of these beatmakers could be a catalyst for your biggest release yet, but Nas managed to loop all of them together to lace him with 10 of the best beats in all the boroughs.

I think it’s a miracle that that album worked, added Keith Murphy, a senior editor at VIBE. It could have easily been the case of all these producers trying to out-produce each other, and not having that synergy.

If the past 25 years are any indication, however, it’s clear that the album not only worked, but has become a pillar in the hip-hop canonical that’s impossible to overlook. Fans and critics alike consistently place it as one of the best albums of all time, if not the very best.

It’s interesting, in ’94, I think the whole idea of a classic was a to-be-determined thing, Kot said. Hip-hop wasn’t a multi-generational [genre] yet, it was still very much its generation, maybe a second generation. Generation after generation picked up on that album as a landmark, and with good reason. Illmatic is to hip-hop as [The Beatles’] Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was to the Baby Boomer generation, or The Clash’s London Calling was to the punk rock generation.

Still, the fortunate window in which it was released has certainly played a role in why it’s been remembered so fondly. Hip-hop was still in it’s relative infancy in the early 1990s; much of the industry prerequisites needed to ensure it stuck into the new millenium were still being built. As the following years ushered in new centers for conversation through radio and other forms of press, however, Illmatic quickly became a reference point due to how fresh it was in the public memory, giving it a leg up on albums that had dropped as little as five years prior.

It’s like the Studio 54 documentary, added Paul Cantor, a longtime writer who’s been published at Billboard, Rolling Stone, and more. Studio 54 is legendary, but it’s not the only nightclub that existed. Those guys were just really good at making sure people wrote about Studio 54, there was a great effort to get people to talk about it, cover stories, things like that.

Illmatic’s relatability has also helped it translate across generations, as younger listeners have been able to pick it up and hear themselves in the lyrics. Even though it’s highly centralized around his own experiences in Queensbridge, he steps out of his own skin to craft a larger narrative; at times the centerpiece of the action, at times the fly on the wall observing the entire panorama. The range of viewpoints he brought to the table allows for a wider audience to resonate with it, regardless of the listener’s personal background.

I have a son who’s 11 right now, and a 17-year-old daughter as well, said Wayne Clark, a co-host of Everyday Struggle. I think ’The World is Yours’ was [on] NBA 2K13, when JAY-Z did the soundtrack. So, my son would start singing the song from there; the way technology is, there’s always something there to remind us.

In addition to watching his own son take to the album so strongly, Clark manages an 18 year old artist from Harlem by the name of TJ Porter, who cites Nas as his favorite rapper. Clark says that hearing Nas’ razor sharp precision at such a young age makes him want more out of his younger artists such as Porter, pushing them to dig deeper in their songwriting and make the most out of every bar.

For Andre Torres, the Vice President of Urban Catalogue at UMG, it wasn’t so much the lyrics that hooked his son to Illmatic, but the vivid backdrops in which Nas rapped. As his son began getting into production and making music for himself, Illmatic served as a point of commonality between the two and allowed Torres to teach his son about the roots of sampling and how it’s become a critical part of hip-hop.

We were listening to [American jazz pianist] Ahmad Jamal at dinner and talking about sampling, he said. The passage that Pete Rock uses for ’The World is Yours,’ it came on and I was like, ’You hear that?’ And then I put the Nas joint on, and my son was like ’Ahhh!’ He kind of pieced it together.

Still, there’s a reason why much of Nas’ subsequent output took a sharp turn from the sonics that formed the foundation of Illmatic. Initial sales sagged lower than what he and his record label, Columbia, had hoped for, even as many critics were hailing the project with rave reviews. At the 1995 Source Awards in New York City, Nas failed to take home even a single trophy, while missing out on Album of the Year and Lyricist of the Year to his fellow New Yorker, The Notorious B.I.G. As an artist, the dynamic between sticking to your creative guns and releasing music aimed at making a larger commercial impact can be daunting, and before long, Nas’ follow-up It Was Written showed he was starting to lean toward the latter.

The funny thing that ends up happening is now Illmatic is a platinum album, it just took 10 years, Crawford said. If only a million people had ran out and bought it right away, it makes you think of how different the history of hip-hop would have been.

Regardless, his seismic contributions to hip-hop have been well documented. Illmatic played a major role in helping the genre receive respect on a wider scale as a legitimate art form, paving the way for future artists to be recognized with awards and distinctions previously unheard of.

No disrespect to Kendrick [Lamar], he deserved that Pulitzer, but Illmatic should have got one 25 years ago too, Murphy said. The world hadn’t woken up to the kind of artistic contributions that young kids from the ghetto were putting out, and thank God that in the 25 years since, we’ve gotten to the point where an artist like Kendrick can be recognized for that. But if they ever give a lifetime achievement for the Pulitzer, they need to holler at that man.

And of course, there are the vivid memories that come along with the album. For Cantor, one instance in particular has been ingrained into his memory, harkening back to his days as a youth in New York when the album rang through the boroughs for the first times.

It was a guy in my neighborhood, I was sitting in his living room and him and his brother are bagging up cocaine in the kitchen, he said. They were playing Nas in the house, it wasn’t on super loud. His brother put on ’Life’s a Bitch,’ and he had this big bag of cocaine in his hand. He pauses and turns around, and he says something like ’Yo, turn that up. Illmatic is my shit.’ That memory really sticks with me.