How Nas Made The World His Own With Illmatic
Looking back on 30 years of the Queensbridge rap great’s iconic debut
Some classics come from people well into their careers, but Nas’ Illmatic, which still stands as a hip-hop classic, was not one of those.
Rather, the album, released 30 years ago today, was the work of a gifted young New Yorker yet to turn 21 — with the confidence to aim high with his choice of collaborators and the observational eye and skill to back it up.
Illmatic was the product of Nas’ environment, the Queensbridge Houses where he grew up. The largest housing project in America, just off the East River, it certainly wasn’t immune to the things that hit the projects all over the country. The combination of poverty and the crack epidemic took its toll.
But Queensbridge was also fertile ground for hip-hop — names like Marley Marl, MC Shan and the Juice Crew. Just behind them, born in the ’70s, a new group of hip-hop performers were honing their craft. Among them was a teenager named Nasir Jones.
His father, Olu Dara, was a jazz musician. His mother, Ann (who later raised her sons as a single mom), was a postal worker. Both passed on their knowledge to him, but it was his best childhood friend in the projects, Will “Ill Will” Graham, who helped turn him on to hip-hop. By the end of the ’80s, he was going under the name of Nasty Nas and recording demos with producer Large Professor, a member of Main Source.
Nothing became of those demos. Nas did, however, get to appear on the posse cut “Live at the Barbeque” on Main Source’s 1991 cult classic album Breaking Atoms. His audacious verse, where he dropped lines like “Verbal assassin/My architect pleases/When I was 12/I went to hell for snuffin’ Jesus!” raised his profile, although not right away.
Years later, Nas recalled to NPR his first time hearing it on the radio. He was hanging out late one night in Queensbridge with some older guys who were drinking beers with their car radio playing. When “Live at the Barbeque” came on, the 17-year-old excitedly tried to tell them, “Yo! That’s me!” The guys kept drinking, treating both the song on the radio and the kid as background noise to ignore.
Ignoring the “Whatever, kid” treatment, Nas walked to his apartment, his mind buzzing at the moment.
3rd Bass rapper MC Serch signed Nas to his production company, hoping to secure a deal. He first went to Russell Simmons, head of 3rd Bass’s label Def Jam.
Simmons wasn’t impressed. As the story goes, he heard some demos, then opined that Nas sounded too much like Kool G Rap and thus didn’t have sales potential.
The stories diverge on how many other labels were in the picture and when, but Faith Newman, who had left Def Jam to become director of A&R at Columbia earlier in 1991, was already interested.
AUDIO: Main Source “Live at the Barbeque”
Newman’s ears had perked up when she first heard “Live at the Barbeque” on the radio, taking notice of that verse.
When Nas was brought to Columbia, the deal was struck.
Illmatic wasn’t created quickly. Nas kept his own pace, being a diligent perfectionist when he was in the studio. The album was put together over parts of 1992 and 1993 with some of the material dating farther back. It evolved over time.
“I saw what was working, what wasn’t working,” Nas told Songfacts in 2018. “I saw artists make bad decisions. I trusted the sound, and that the listener would really feel comfortable with that sound, which really represents most of the elements of hip-hop music. I wanted it to be that way.”
Nas would cause frustration by going over budget, but the combination of what he was coming up with and the lyrics for what was coming eased some of those concerns.
He mostly kept a selective profile at the time. His only other guest verse was on the posse cut “Back to the Grill” on Serch’s lone solo album — 1992’s Return of the Product. His first single, “Halftime,” still under the Nasty Nas name, came out the same year off the soundtrack to Zebrahead, a low-budget drama about an interracial romance.
VIDEO: Nas “Halftime”
The song was the first taste of Illmatic, but it almost didn’t have its beat.
Large Professor came up with it at home one day while Busta Rhymes was visiting. He offered it to Busta, who turned it down.
“I didn’t know what to do with it,” Busta Rhymes told XXL in 2014. “I didn’t know why I didn’t know what to do with it, because I loved the shit out the beat. Then I heard it on ‘Halftime,’ and I was like, Goddamn, I was a stupid ass for not touching this beat!”
Whereas Busta might have exploded over the beat, Nas glides over it, full of sharp braggadocio and a social eye (with its references to NARC and the police killing of Washington Heights resident Jose “Kiko” Garcia).
It was a strong opening salvo, even with the album itself many months away.
Nas, at that point, knew enough people, Large Professor in particular. DJ Premier from Gang Starr, Q-Tip from A Tribe Called Quest and Pete Rock would be brought in to produce additional tracks. Nas brought in childhood friend L.E.S. and did a little production himself.
Even though Nas wasn’t putting out much material or doing much in the way of features, the hype train was well underway.
In some quarters, he was getting hyped as the next Rakim. The demand was such that people got creative, purloining material for mixtapes and radio.
In the end, Columbia put out the album with ten songs because it wanted to get it out before bootleggers got hold of the entire thing.
The anticipation in the hip-hop community was palpable. Then came the critical applause, most notably a 5 Mics review (not a common thing at all) in The Source, written by intern Minya Oh (the future Miss Info at Hot 97) under a pseudonym because the editors wanted it done by someone with more distance from the hype.
But at last the album arrived, opening with an in-the-know interlude, sampling early dialogue from the 1983 cult movie Wild Style. It was an early glimpse into the underground worlds of hip-hop and graffiti art, making an impression on a young Nas, whose father took him to see it in the theater.
He cannily set it against a sample of his “Live at the Barbeque” verse, before switching to an instrumental from the film as Nas, his younger brother Jungle and an up-and-coming AZ (the only guest rapper on the album) start shooting the shit about being real and dreaming big.
Ironically enough, it was the hardest sample to clear, as it took some work to get the film’s director to agree.
VIDEO: Nas performs “N.Y. State of Mind” at SXSW 2012
With the tone set, Illmatic truly announced its presence with “N.Y. State of Mind,” starting with the first rapped words out of Nas’ mouth — “Straight out the fuckin’ dungeons of rap/ Where fake ni–as don’t make it back.”
The slight pause after he delivers that line before he says “I don’t know how to start this shit,” is real. DJ Premier came up with the beat, an effective crate diggers’ delight blend of Kool & The Gang, Donald Byrd and, crucially, Joe Chambers’ “Mind Rain.” Nas was still trying to figure out where to jump in with what he’d written when he saw Premier counting.
“He did the whole first verse in one take,” Premier told XXL. “And I remember when he finished the first verse, he stopped and said, ‘Does that sound cool?’ And we were all like, ‘Oh my God!’ It was like, I don’t even care what else you write.”
Through his nimble flow and the hat-tipping hook sample from Eric B & Rakim, Nas created a portrait of the criminal hustle in the cut, where one of the pitfalls is what begins as a way out tethers you to what you wanted to get away from. The hustler’s left way wearier than their actual age.
AZ and Nas traded verses on “Life’s a Bitch,” another vivid exploration of dreaming in dire circumstances where dreams can get easily crushed.
Nas wanted it to be over a sample of Mtume’s “Juicy Fruit,” but L.E.S. had other ideas, going with the Gap Band’s “Yearning For Your Love” instead. It proved to be fortuitous, given how the Notorious B.I.G. would use that Mtume song to hit effect on “Juicy” later that year.
The track came together in unplanned ways. AZ happened to be there and was asked if he had anything. It turned out he had his verses, the hook and the perfect chemistry with Nas on the track. Olu Dara was at the studio with his horn, so his son asked him to play a trumpet outro that reminded him of his sons as kids.
VIDEO: Nas feat. AZ “Life’s a Bitch” (Live at SXSW 2012)
There’s no underestimating the presence of the Queensbridge Houses on Illmatic. The neighborhood where he’d grown up forged friendship and left some good memories. But there was also a lot of pain and desperation, something Nas unflinchingly chronicled.
The reality is that many never got out of the projects. Will Graham, was killed in a 1992 shooting where Jungle was wounded. Nas would reference Will multiple times on the album and, some years later, named his label Ill Will after him.
In a sadly striking scene in the 2014 documentary Time Is Illmatic, Jungle underscored what the situation was. Shown a picture from the album’s disc sleeve, with Nas surrounded by kids and young men in Queensbridge, he pointed out the fates that so many in the photo didn’t escape.
“Some of them people gonna catch murders, some of them people gonna get beat up, some of them people gonna go to jail, but all them people gonna have a story,” Jungle said as he moved a finger across the photo. “He’s doing 15 years. He’s fighting a murder. He’s doing life in prison. He just got locked up, no bail. He just did a shit load of time in North Carolina, bricks, crazy ass life. He do a bunch of fucking time, in and out of jail. This shit is real, this the projects.”
Then the viewer sees Nas, then on the cusp of middle age, watching Jungle recount all that had befallen those young men and kids, the realization that few of them got out. The weight of that clearly hitting him, he manages to get out the words, “That’s fucked up.”
Those same projects are on the memorable cover. A Danny Clinch photo taken in the middle of Queensbridge seemingly fading with a picture of a seven-year-old Nas superimposed over it.
“The ghetto makes you think. The world is ours,” he told MTV.com in 1994. “I used to think I couldn’t leave my projects. I used to think if I left, if anything happened to me, I thought it would be no justice or I would be just a dead slave or something. The projects used to be my world until I educated myself to see there’s more out there.”
Life through the Queensbridge lens defined “The World Is Yours,” which remains Illmatic’s defining cut.
The boom bap came from Pete Rock, who had in it a stash of beats when Large Professor brought Nas up to Mt. Vernon to meet him. The track was built around two key elements — the jazz piano from the Ahmad Jamal Trio’s “I Love Music” and a sample of T La Rock’s 1984 single “It’s Yours” (the first single labeled Def Jam and one Nas wanted).
As much as variations on “keep it real” became catchphrases, line by line, Nas was real on “The World is Yours.” Life wasn’t a Scarface fantasy. Paths out were difficult when your enemy could be someone you know, the cops or yourself. The desire for relief, for yourself and those around you, was ever present and the escape hatch could be brute force capitalism. As Nas rapped in the line Jay-Z later used – “I’m out for dead presidents to represent me.”
“Memory Lane (Sittin’ in Da Park),” which followed “Halftime,” reflected the inherent poignancy in Queensbridge and places like it.
DJ Premier wanted a harder-edged beat for it, but Nas insisted on a jazzier one using Reuben Wilson’s “We’re in Love.” With musical shoutouts to his Queensbridge elders Marley Marl and the Juice Crew, it was both “back in the day” and “this is what it is now.”
As Nas told XXL: “I just felt like all the shit I saw in Queensbridge, it meant something. For some reason, I knew this ain’t the average shit a kid my age is supposed to be seeing. I knew it was something special about what I was seeing, and it wasn’t all good. This was real life. It’s situations—whether it’s welfare, or my friends’ havin’ dope-fiend parents, or teenagers being chased by cops.”
The sadness took a different turn in the Q Tip-produced “One Love,” in which Nas fills in incarcerated friends on what’s happened in the neighborhood since they’ve been locked up, as sampled vibes from an old Heath Brothers track ring.
While AZ was the album’s only guest with a verse, Nas was open to others for a hook. Q-Tip repeated the title of “One Love.” On “One Time 4 Your Mind,” Grand Wizard rapped “One time for your mind, one time,” to which Nas immediately responded with “Yeah, whatever.”
Lyrically, it’s a reprieve from what preceded it, created out of a desire to chill and have fun. If not essential on its own, it functions as a breathing space.
“Represent” was one of the earlier cuts, the first DJ Premier produced for Illmatic. It was jazzy and bass-driven, but then Premier eventually heard more of the beats others had come up with for other songs. Feeling he could do better, he remixed it to the same vocals.
It was Nas at his most aggressive, defiantly Queensbridge (“Straight up, shit is real/And any day could be your last in the jungle/Get murdered on a humble, guns’ll blast, ni–as tumble”), complete with Jungle and friends who were hanging out at the studio that day joining him in the booth.
Nas has talked about not just wanting to represent his neighborhood and its hip-hop predecessors (especially in light with their battles with South Bronx rappers), but to make a strong New York City album in response to what he felt were high quality releases coming from the West Coast at the time. That spirit clearly comes through loudly on “Represent.”
VIDEO: Nas “It Ain’t Hard to Tell”
Album closer “It Ain’t Hard to Tell” was an earlier track with Large Professor, built around a sample of Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature.” It was on the demo Nas shopped to labels, a track Columbia clearly liked as it later became Illmatic’s first single.
It’s one last blast of Nas’ dexterity at the mic (“Street’s disciple, I rock beats that’s mega trifle/And groove even smoother than moves by Villanova/You’re still a soldier, I’m like Sly Stone in Cobra/Packin’ like a Rasta in the weed spot/Vocals will squeeze Glocks”), his confident boasts playing perfectly off that smooth MJ ballad sample.
There was hype. A lot of hip-hop fans, in and out of the industry, couldn’t wait for it. But then, it didn’t become the smash hit of 1994.
Simmons was initially correct in one regard. Illmatic wasn’t a big hit upon its release, despite the buzz. It failed to go gold in its first year of release, taking 21 months to get there on its way to being certified platinum over seven years after its release.
There wasn’t a pop crossover hit (the three rap cuts to make the top 25 of Billboard’s year-end 100 for 1994 were “Whatta Man,” “Fantastic Voyage” and “Regulate”). He didn’t crack the publication’s Top 50 charting rap singles, a list that included Hammer’s “Pumps and a Bump” and two songs by Shaquille O’Neal.
The relatively slow sales pace led Nas to take his second album in a more polished, mainstream direction. It Was Written, released in the summer of 1996, became the desired commercial hit, albeit with less universal acclaim than the debut.
Despite its success, the follow-up set the narrative in motion that Illmatic’s level was something Nas couldn’t reach again. It was fueled by a run of so-so albums as the ’90s ended and by JAY-Z’s lyrical broadsides (which Nas always fired back at during the run of their feud).
But Nas hasn’t shrunk from the creative challenge. He now has 17 albums to his credit, being especially prolific in recent years. His two mostly well-received trilogies — King’s Disease and Magic –comprised six albums over 37 months ending last September.
Still, it’s Illmatic that holds the most prominent place in Nas’ career. Listening now, it’s easy to see why.
Part reporter, part storyteller, Nas had seen some shit by the time he was 20. He delivered matter of factly, with more vulnerability and even hope than others might have.
Between what the producers came up with and with Nas’ input, the album still sounds great.
It still stands as one of the classics of its era, a debut that acknowledged the neighborhood that spawned it, eventually reaching out beyond its hard-core hip-hop base.
The people in the know knew. Queensbridge knew. The rest of the country caught up.
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