Nas's Illmatic
Page 5
On the soundtrack, Nas would get his first opportunity to present a solo track, surrounded by fellow unknowns and a few moderate-sized names like MC Breed and old-schooler Kool Moe Dee. Produced by Large Professor, “Halftime” was the chance for Nas to stretch out over multiple verses. The results were so good that Serch decided to release it as the lead single from the soundtrack, despite featuring a minimalist chorus that consists of the emcee repeating “It’s halftime” over and over.
As far as the Illmatic era is concerned, “Halftime” may be Nas’s most spectacular display of raw talent. Sixty-four bars broken up by two simple choruses, the song weaves together Nas’s strongest abilities: mic boasting, street stories, and snap-quick metaphors. Its title serves as an accurate midway point on Nas’s eventual debut, but it’s also a fitting description of the bridge between the rapper’s early style and what would be presented to the world a year and a half later on Illmatic.
Still present is the shock rapper that “went to hell for snuffing Jesus.” Here he’s “putting hits on 5-0/‘Cause when it’s my time to go, I’ll wait for God with the fo-fo.” He’s also got the same sharp wit, claiming “you couldn’t catch me in the streets without a ton of reefer/that’s like Malcolm X catchin’ the jungle fever” and “I’m as ill as a convict who kills for phone time.” His flow is smooth and fast: he’s back to relying on his own cadence, and it suits him perfectly.
But there’s no trace of nervousness here. In fact, this may be the most confident track Nas has ever done, even more brazen than “Hate Me Now.” His status on the mic is his main focus. “I’m an ace when I face the bass.” “When I attack there ain’t an army that can strike back/So I react never calmly on the hype track.” “These are the lyrics of the man, you can’t near it, understand/‘cause in the streets I’m well-known like the numbers man.” ‘“Cause when I blast the herb, that’s my word/I’ll be slayin’ ’em fast, doin’ this, that, and the third.”
And here is the thoughtful Nas, casually tossing off gems of insight into his life and times. “I used to hustle—now all I do is relax and strive.” “I used to watch C.H.I.P.’s, now I load glock clips.” “I won’t plant seeds, don’t need an extra mouth I can’t feed.” At the end, he shouts out his fallen friend: “III Will rest in peace.”
The single would generate enough buzz to get hip hop fans, especially in New York, excited about Nas’s prospects. Here was a hot new artist that had a major-label record deal, a great producer in Large Professor, and a savvy executive producer in MC Serch. Yet, like so many records delayed and perfected, Illmatic wouldn’t be released for another two years.
The lost time between Nas’s signing and his debut was a turbulent time for hip hop. Though The Chronic would dominate the year, the East Coast rose from its would-be death bed thanks to two albums from groups. The Wu Tang Clan’s Enter the Wu: 36 Chambers created a new mythology and collective format that countless groups have attempted to imitate since, while Black Moon’s Enta Da Stage proved that there was still a place for hardcore New York hip hop in the marketplace. DJ Premier made one of his best beats with Jeru the Damaja’s “Come Clean,” while Q-Tip’s group A Tribe Called Quest produced their second straight classic with Midnight Marauders. Like Nas, the East Coast would survive to fight another day.
Still only 18, Nas’s path towards signed artist and into having an actual major-label release seems both easy and oversimplified. Like most hip hop musicians, his pre-release schedule was littered with delayed release dates, half-successes, and various street and label politics that are better saved for a gossip column (or, in the case of Nas’s ex-girlfriend and mother of his daughter, Carmen Bryan, a trashy tell-all memoir). Stories of Puffy storming into Columbia’s offices claiming to represent Nas and of the various ups and downs of Serch, who would go on to executive produce Illmatic, and his relationship with his client largely fall by the wayside when viewed from the distance that the passing of time has afforded us.6
But one thing that shouldn’t be forgotten in the story is that Nas was still a very young man, struggling with the pressures of growing up, making a full-length record, and becoming a father (Bryan would become pregnant in ’93) all at the same time. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of musicians who have been signed to record deals, only to see their potential drift away before they released a single recording. Nas had overcome the obstacles in his path growing up one wrong turn from self-destruction. His struggle to survive in hip hop was just beginning.
Chapter Four
Individual/Community
In her review of Illmatic, published in the Village Voice, Selwyn Seyfu Hinds positioned Nas as the potential savior of New York hip hop. “Artistically, commercially, and socially, crews affirm the value of community and offer a motivational blueprint,” she wrote of the dominant format in contemporary New York rap, “but hip hop has always had a love affair with the soloist.” Preparing her audience for a new era in rap hardly seemed out of the question, as this level of expectation was shared by people throughout the New York hip hop community. Nas was the rapper that would bring New York into the 90s.
One of the most prevalent narrative threads in hip hop is the evolution from what was a music genre created by disc jockeys, the faceless puppeteers guiding the crowd, into a rock-style lead-vocalist system. The music took a back seat to the poetry and (more often) the persona of the man (or, very rarely, woman) with the mic in his hand. It started by turning MCs into the focus, and culminated with the elimination of groups within the past ten years. In the early to mid 90s, the number of hip hop groups was huge and expanding rapidly, particularly in New York. These days, with the exception of a few collectives and labels around the industry, it’s hard to name any group that’s made any kind of significant impact. Clipse? Three 6 Mafia? Certainly not the Ying Yang Twins (say it ain’t so). Outkast and Wu Tang (who are both suffering from internal conflict) seem like leftovers from another time completely.
This transition was inevitable in the long run, not just because people gravitate towards vocals but because it was vital to ensuring the genre’s success in the mainstream market. This was the power America looks for in its stars: the man at the front of stage, standing alone, leading the musicians, ruling the crowd. In the early nineties, West Coast rappers like Tupac, Ice Cube, and Snoop Doggy Dogg were starting to understand this better than anyone. The transition from neighborhood crew to lone gangster sitting on top of the world had begun.
With the culture of community still very much alive in New York, it would have seemed as if the record Nas released in April, 1994 was his and his alone. With other voices limited to sixteen bars, a repeated chorus, and the occasional sample or offhand comment, the story of Illmatic is, in a very real sense, an individual’s journey through his own psyche and his, own personal experience. The album plays into the rap-star narrative just as strongly as it does the poor-kid-made-artist one.
But like everything about the record, this simplified take masks the real story behind Illmatic. With the exception of “Life’s a Bitch,” each song on the album is a true collaboration between two people. Those pairings are an indication of the resources Nas drew on within the New York hip hop community. Pete Rock, who produced “The World Is Yours,” had already established himself as a powerhouse with what many New York underground fans consider the greatest beat of all time, “T.R.O.Y. (They Reminisce Over You),” off his 1992 album Mecca and the Soul Brother with emcee/partner C.L. Smooth. Q-Tip, who produced “One Love,” was, as mentioned before, one of the core members of the already legendary A Tribe Called Quest. DJ Premier, who, like Large Professor, contributed three beats to the finished product, was a well-established producer across hip hop, in particular with his own established pairing with emcee Guru as Gang Starr.
Until Illmatic, hip hop records were generally the product of one producer working with a group to implement their musical vision.7 This was partially a holdover from the era where DJs/producers were the bigger star
s (it’s Eric B and Rakim, not Rakim and Eric B). But hip hop’s ascent to the top of the pop charts pumped so much money into the recording process that it has made freelance producing, where beats routinely go for six figures within the a-list marketplace, seriously viable. More importantly, this kind of approach to record making was legitimized and encouraged by the response Illmatic received from influential tastemakers. Combining producers like those mentioned above on a single album was enough to generate major heat all by itself. Instead of viewing the album as an individual personal statement, many New York advocates thought of the record more in the way the Wu Tang described themselves on Enter the Wu a year earlier: a real-life Voltron, powerful individuals that come together into one unstoppable being—only this time, Nas is the head.
Unlike modern-day major releases, however, Illmatic’s beats were not presented to Nas without context. In fact, as Nas would tell Vibe, with the exception of Pete Rock, whom Nas visited in his Mount Vernon home, “every other producer had come to me, to Queensbridge, to get to know me. It was like, ‘Yo, come out here with us while we run some errands, or just hang out at a girl’s house and smoke blunts, or just drink and talk.’ These were the guys that came to really feel where I was corning from.” The result was a Nas that drew on community (in the hip hop sense) talent sources to most convincingly portray an individual’s experience.
The year Nas spent recording Illmatic, which began with the recording of the original version of first single “It Ain’t Hard to Tell,” and ended with the last-minute switched beat on “Represent,” consisted of this effort, mixed with a lot of youthful procrastination and honing of rhymes, though little wasted tape. Despite Nas’s reputation post-Illmatic for leaving scores of unreleased also-ran album cuts in his wake, only one track was left off of his debut, the Large Professor-produced “I’m a Villain.”
That track starts with lines soon to be stuck in the middle of the second verse of “NY State of Mind.” The overall effect is a glance into Nas’s mindset as a man struggling with his place as an artist. Over a massive rolling bassline that could have laced your average golden-age De La Soul record, Nas lays out his case for Lex Luthor status. Then, on the second verse, he gets political.
I got beef with the president, and still loving it
Trying to make plans to overthrow the government.
It won’t work, cause niggas don’t believe enough
They’d rather stand on the corners and receive a cuff
Around they wrist, you don’t like the sound of this
Rebel, but my country doesn’t want me
They’d rather hunt me but you’ll never catch us all
While you’re fuckin’ with the dealers we’ll be sticking up the malls
Unless you count the aimless “kidnap the president’s wife without a plan,” this is the first time Nas directly addresses the government at large. He argues against his own ability as an individual to initiate change within his community (defined in the narrowest sense as street hoods), and then uses that same inability within his own people—“they’d rather stand on the corners and receive a cuff’—against the system that is holding them down: “you’ll never catch us all.” He has efficiently shot down his individual goals and relented to his community’s anarchic power in eight bars.
Though Nas (the rapper/the person) is the individual that stands with/against social constructs in Illmatic, these communities are a constantly shifting, expanding, and contracting series of groups. New York hip hop heads and his own Queensbridge peers are his most direct influences, but he hardly stays local and underground on the record. After all, one song finds him owning the world. The first non-sampled words on the record come from Nas’s friend and future rapper Cormega interacting with the mainstream: “what the fuck is this bullshit on the radio, son?” Though he qualifies his audience at the beginning of “Memory Lane,” it’s hardly an exclusive club: “I rap for listeners, blunt heads, fly ladies and prisoners, Henessey holders and old school niggas.” Through it all, Nas remains in the first person.
Nas’s insular persona clashes with his universal presentation throughout the record, in even the most elementary regard; that is, after all, one child doing battle with an entire housing project for sole rights to the cover. It extends to the tracklisting as well. Though each song can sometimes seem exclusive to New York, Queens, Queensbridge, or one block of the projects, every tide on the album has a universal connotation, or at least some other meaning related to the overall American culture:. The Genesis. N.Y. State of Mind. Life’s a Bitch. The World Is Yours. Halftime. Memory Lane. One Love. One Time 4 Your Mind. Represent. It Ain’t Hard to Tell. Rappers have made songs with rallying-cry titles like “Fuck the Police” and seemingly bizarre leftfield titles like “A Rollerskating Jam Named ‘Saturdays,’” which respectively flail around in thoughtless rebellion or jest without proper context. Each of the titles Nas uses to describe his specific experience on his specific block evokes a different but immediate association for every person that hears it, before they even press play.
Yet the album is called Illmatic, a word which few people had ever heard before. Like everything in his past Nas seems to have a different answer every time someone asks him about it, defining the word in many different ways, ranging from “beyond ill” or “the ultimate,” to a simple descriptive term for the music he and his crew listened to in the projects. He has often referenced a friend named Illmatic Ice who was serving time when the record was released. But one thing it seems he hasn’t pointed out is that the word had in fact been used previously on record, by Queensbridge emcee Tragedy on Marley Marl’s 1988 compilation In Control Vol. 1.“The rap automatical, the rhymatical,” the emcee raps, “forget ill, I get illmatical.” Nas had certainly heard the song. Not only were both of the song’s creators from Queensbridge, but Nas has often cited Tragedy as an early influence. The older emcee even recounted in one interview a story about Nas telling him that he learned to put a slash after each line by reading Tragedy’s rhymes over his shoulder as he wrote.
Still, this minor reference hardly detracts from the fact that here was a new word being introduced to the general populace, immediately alienating a large portion of the public which must have simply felt (and still does today) that this album cannot be for them if they don’t even understand the title. He essentially achieved what Raekwon of Wu Tang would go for a year later without actually naming the record Only Built 4 Cuban Linx (a term for tough street-level gangsters). Of course, the irony of this—one most rappers fully understand—is that once the average individual outsider does understand these insider references, they feel like they are a part of the community. Like the music contained within it, the tide of Illmatic might be initially alienating for those who did not experience what Nas has experienced. But in their mind once that key is turned, like entry into an exclusive club, a simple effort will unveil an overlooked world to the patient visitor, a world other still-excluded members of their own communities will never get to see.
For most reviewers, that world was rich with vision, skill, and excitement. Illmatic was not a record that needed time to build to a critical consensus; here was one community that embraced the Nasty kid from Queens. After an enormous amount of buzz and features in everything from major magazines like Vibe to underground zines like The Flavor, Illmatic still managed to receive universally glowing reviews. Rolling Stone, still barely jumping on the hip hop bandwagon—and then, reluctantly—nevertheless had rap journalist Touré give the album four stars, calling it “a rose stretching up between cracks in the sidewalk, calling attention to its beauty, calling attention to the lack of it everywhere else.” Even Time magazine joined the fray, insisting to its mainstream readers that “Nas isn’t a gangsta rapper,” and “despite the subject matter, most of the songs are leisurely paced, with amiable melodies.”
The one review that mattered, however, is certainly the one that gave out the most famous rating in hip hop history. Illmatic receiv
ed a five mic rating from the then-untouchable Source magazine. Started in 1988 by David Mays and Jon Shecter, the newsletter-turned-magazine quickly became the dominant voice of hip hop journalism. Though its star has fallen about as far as it could in the past decade, the magazine was, at the time, the lone respected outlet for hip hop that was also viewed as a legitimate source (no pun intended) by true hip hop fans. It’s difficult to overestimate the impact of receiving five out of five mics, the first such rating given to any new release by the magazine since its then-editor Reginald Dennis put a moratorium on them, when evaluating the reputation of the album within the hip hop community.
The rating did not come without its share of controversy. Only two years previous, Dr. Dre’s The Chronic, a universally acclaimed record, received 4.5 mics, despite (no joke) essentially redefining the cultural landscape in young America. So when Illmatic, arguably the definition of New York hip hop, received the maximum rating, many fans who had often criticized the magazine for favoring the East Coast over the West pointed to the rating as confirmation of this bias.
But really, the bias came from one man, Source co-founder Jon Shecter. In a comprehensive interview with hiphopdx.com, Dennis told the story:
I only gave one 5 under my watch and it went to Nas’s Illmatic. It was the only time I ever broke the no 5 rule. Jon Shecter had gotten his hands on the album like eight months before it was scheduled to drop. And just like I was with The Chronic a few months earlier, Jon didn’t let the tape out of his sight. Not only that, but he constantly raved about it. Everyday…Everyday, Jon was like, “yo, this album is 5 mics—seriously, Reg, 5 mics. ….”