A New, New York State Of Mind

When Nas entered the rap arena with Illlmatic, a sea change was about to engulph NYC and eventually the globe. Lets go back to 1994...

By Brian Salkowski

If the Notorious BIG verbally takes us inside his body and thuggish muggish mind, letting us feel what it is like to move around in a world as big, brutal, jocular and intimidating as himself, Nas takes us inside his LINE OF VISION, his POV on the HOOD SCENE. In this way he PROVIDES us with a striking CONTINUITY of extreme long shots and close-ups, always giving us the best seat in the house while he conjures the carnival of lost souls that made camp in his 1990s Queensbridge neighborhood. Arguably, some of the most memorably dark, depressive but flowing lyrics in hip-hop history were written by Nas.

Lyrics full to bursting with desperate criminal intent and murderous deeds, raw panic, paranoia, random, in- discriminate violence, and a bunker mentality. The words and music composed by Nas and others in that time invented a truly black noir narrative form-a brilliantly scored urban counterpoint, bent on exposing an American underside where the nation's swarthiest Others define normality. Here is an apocalyptic and damned America where the moral codes echo those found in Depression-era gangster movies-codes that treat betrayal of brother as a sin greater than mass murder and glorify bestial your criminal ways of life that could only offer imminent extinction or incar ceration as things to be cherished far more than civilized notions of evolution, progression, permanence, or stability.

Up to that point, rapper's we're not including both conscious elements along with the "gangster" elements. With Nas, he took the best of both and combined it without it coming off sounding contrived or forced. It completely sounds organic. So much so, after the release of Illmatic, suddenly in New York City especially, rappers soon developed the slow, methodical plain spoken way of rhyming that became the default for most.

Speaking about his lyrical masterpiece, Illmatic, the song "N.Y. State of Mind," Nas presents us with a peripatetic, spectral, metaphysical anti hero outracing temptation, poverty, and evisceration in a razor edged hall of mirrors, an antihero with enough fatalism and self-consciousness to know he's already a ghost, a figment of ghettos past, landscapes already dissipated and dispirited, a dead man walking and talking himself into an even more vicious and more bland next century that will have no place for his kind: self-starting lone wolves of a vanishing American urban wilderness. Men utterly romantic, profane, and self mythologizing about their tall-in-the-saddle inner-city cowboy swagger and survival skills.

Men who define an era that was already receding into nostalgia while it happened, men who opened wide those grimy, dark, subterranean tunnels where the most valiant and downtrodden of America's dreamers were playing an illicit, illegal, illmatic inner-city trade. Borderlands whose only logic and sense showed up in hip-hop, where living to stylishly to the ugly, a gully-gothie tale offered a way out of that tale's most stereotypical and pathetic denouements. Nas, upon the release of Illmatic, was revealed to be a tragician and tactician of the highest order. He became almost a enigmatic force. Laid back, yet ready for whatever is thrown at him. As I mentioned before, the album and Nas started a sea change with style and rhyme scheme that influenced so many.

This new, New York State Of Mind that Nasir Jones took us into, was exactly what was needed. In 1994, the future of the country was bleak looking to say the very least. Like out of some Stephen King apocalyptic novel, crack cocaine and violence had a tight grip on so many cities.

I, and every hip hop head, thank Nas for providing us narrative and a escape while living in this semi-dystopian world. A lyrical driver, taking us on a ride, helping us decipher the madness and appreciating the beautiful side of things in this new, New York State Of Mind.