Illmatic- The Beginning

By Brian Salkowski

(Originally written in 1998)

A look at the album, the era it emerged in and the style it cultivated.

Illmatic is a visceral account of ghetto life (an environment defined by an intersection of illegal drugs, gangs and crime). Indeed, Illmatic has been championed as a realist text: a harrowing account of the projects in the aftermath of a drug epidemic: in the late 80s, crack cocaine infiltrated black working-class communities to an unprecedented degree. Legislation was needed for this terribly. In 1986 Joe Biden, yes our current president, lobbied hard with other Democrats and surprisingly bipartisan support for what turned out to be the 1994 crime bill. The bill clearly states that African Americans are more likely to use and distribute crack cocaine. With slip shot data and a society in fear they came to the conclusion that the punishment for possession or use will go up tenfold based on the race of the offender. There was a piece of fine print that wasn't perceived to be so fine. The punishment automatically went up for blacks. If a white individual got caught with the same amount, the punishment stayed the same to what was on the law books at the time.

In 1996, Blacks constituted 62.6% of drug offenders in state prisons. Nationwide, the rate of persons admitted to prison on drug charges for Black men is 13 times that for White men, and in 10 states, the rates are 26 to 57 times those for White men. People of color are not more likely to do drugs; Black men do not have an abnormal predilection for intoxication. They are, however, more likely to be arrested and prosecuted for their use. This study bears upon Illmatic as a document of the 90s; of a time when the violence in black communities reached crisis levels. The album therefore reads as an account of growing up in such harrowing conditions (indeed it reads as an auto-ethnographic account of a life). Looked upon as a document of the ghetto, Illmatic reads as a realist text, designed to immerse the listener in the reality of Queensbridge (borne of an empirical understanding of place). However, given the focus on time over the course of th album, Illmatic also reads as an album on which there are multiple iterations of time.

Nasty Nas, who has yet to put out an album of his own, only seems to get better with age. He gave you a lyrical chin check a few years before with his performance on "Live At the B.B.Q.". Now it's 1994 and with flavor snatched off his upcoming LP, and guess what? Its dope. Nas is one of those artists who never puts out anything wack. Combine a little radio-friendly "Human Nature" with the boom-bap of the streets and what do you get? The next Nasty Nas street delight. It ain't hard to tell that Nas is one of the dopest kids to ever touch the mic. His congested delivery and rapid pacing makes his complex rhymes sound easy, until you try to follow him word for word. He's like a drum, the rhymes keep going and going; they don't build up to a punchline then diminish, every word surpasses the last. There are no throwaway rhymes. When Nas hits the pinnacle he doesn't pause to admire his work, he keeps going: "My mic check is life or death / Breathin' in a sniper's breath / Sparkle like a diamond / Sneak a Uzi on an island in my army jacket linin' / Hit the earth like a comet / Invasion / Nas is like the Afro-centric Asian / Half-man half-amazin' ..." The track might be commercial but the vocal is so raw that you don't even think about crossover. Which just proves the point that a real MC can turn even the most pop-friendly track into a hardcore anthem."

One of the most fascinating parts of the discussion is seeing how once a work of art leaves the artist’s hands, it becomes a living, breathing entity that continues growing. Perceptions change outlooks differ. In an exchange about the line “I dominate break loops, giving mics men-e-strual cycles,” suggesting that the cycles represent a metaphor that refers back to the break loops. Nas says that he did not intend the reference, but also acknowledges that it’s fitting and is now a part of the lyric’s meaning.

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 the city I grew up in-- 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.

“My poetry’s deep, I never fell. Nas’s raps should be locked in a cell. It ain’t hard to tell…”

Aesop’s Fables are a collection of writings which teach valuable moral lessons. Nas’s stories differ in that they don’t teach easy moral lessons, but rather dwell on the darker side of life where good deeds go unrewarded and bad deeds go unpunished.

This song was recorded back when people still used “breaks” – percussion-heavy instrumental interludes – instead of the beats produced by computer today. To prove that Nas really is “the smooth criminal on beat breaks”, the instrumental cuts out the samples that had been in the background for most of the song and allows Nas to rap strictly over a drum kick for the rest of the verse.

Illmatic’s opening song is ‘The Genesis.’ The album’s time, at first, appears Biblical, an apocalyptic journey possibly, which is to say that it appears to assume linear form. This is continued by ‘Halftime’, situated at the album’s midpoint. Yet the ‘end time’ never arrives. Instead, the final song ‘It Ain’t Hard to Tell,’ the most formally and lyrically complex on the album, breaks with the linear style brought about by ‘The Genesis’—‘Halftime’ continuum. The contrast between start and END is now blurred.

It is the album’s most lyrically inventive, ambitious song. It is also markedly more upbeat, resulting from the sample of Michael Jackson’s ‘Human Nature’ and reference to the Five Percenters. A shift in tempo makes apparent the lack of an orchestrated ‘end.’ The coming-of-age narrative, the coming-into-being of Nas as a subject of Queensbridge, reaches a critical apex on ‘Represent.’ By ‘It Ain’t Hard to Tell’ Nas, now integrated into hip-hop culture, is representing Queensbridge. Rhymes such as ‘the brutaliser,

Buddha sizer, the kind of n***a who’ll be pissing in your elevator’ captures the coming to consciousness of Nas as subject of Queensbridge. The break, then, with ‘It Ain’t Hard to Tell’ is more pronounced as a result. Nas ends Illmatic with a song designed to amplify the ‘other’ strand and thereby resolve difficulty posed by the operative nature of the two strands. But it sounds again like the beginning to the beginning. From a Utopian hope- Blochian perspective, ‘It Ain’t Hard to Tell’ is a song that challenges facts—already deemed backwards—from a more radically temporal point of view; in this case, as a new creative genesis. The sampling of Michael Jackson’s disco track ‘Human Nature’ is significant. Jackson, the inveterate ‘king of pop,’ comes into the mix after ‘Represent,’ a song that heralds the realization of subjectivity as that which can be represented while alluding to the transgression of petty street crime: ‘if it wasn’t hanging out in front of cocaine spots, we was in the candy factory, breaking the locks’. Nas shifts the focus from the coming to consciousness of the contingent Queensbridge subject to lyrics which concern a ‘time’ of transgression per se. As such, the album moves from the lyrical celebration of transgressive criminal activities in the past—the activities that typify the day-to-day reality of living in Queensbridge—to a ‘now’ that is indicative of the transgressive potentiality of time itself. This ‘now’ is neither explicit as past nor future, but what makes both possible. ‘Now,’ understood through the lens of Blochian time, is that genesis that marks the first song that is now explicit in the last. ‘It Ain’t Hard to Tell’ brings the coming-of-age narrative of Illmatic to an end. The narrative concludes with Nas discovering representation. ‘Represent’ concerns Nas’s discovery of rap lyricism as a form of poetry and a subsequent vehicle of representation.

The song’s chorus, made up of a group shouting the words ‘represent, represent,’ is the coming to consciousness of the subaltern group in rhymes that reach a dizzying crescendo. The song is about representing the Queensbridge underclass Nas identifies with, with Nas himself assuming the mantel of king rapper for this group.

The high tempo, hard-hitting beats give way to the lower tempo sample infused ‘It Ain’t Hard to Tell.’ In addition, Nas takes a different point of critique: ‘they analyze me, surprise me, but can’t magnetize me’. Having discovered the power of representation, Nas now discovers a time of its inveterate critique ‘scanning while you’re planning ways to sabotage me, I leave ‘em froze like heroin in your nose, Nas’ll rock well, it ain’t hard to tell’. Nas claims on ‘It Ain’t Hard to Tell’ that ‘n***z is frozen,’ before saying that he’ll ‘begin like a violin and end like Leviathan’. The leviathan is a reference to a mythical sea creature, which has Biblical resonance in fashioning order from chaos at the end of time. Hip-hop poetry can have a defrosting effect, in breaking representational categories, all the while transgressive of these same categories.

In conclusion, the contrast is very well pointed out but with the genius of Nas and the placement of his message, you can go into the album thinking this is all doom and gloom, but in reality it is really the most accurate representation of a young man in urban America with a mind that stretches in all different areas and an ear to not only streets but to the sounds to match--- making devastating yet remarkable contradictions and lyrical discovery.