‘Illmatic’ at 30: A look back at rap’s perfect album

Nas’ pursuit of a record deal wasn’t about rapper dreams. It was about survival. Illmatic, which turned 30 on Friday, was the culmination of that drive to keep himself and those he loved alive.

A year after Nas ascended to the top of the underground rap scene with one verse, “Live at the BBQ,” his younger brother, Jungle, and his best friend, William “Ill Will” Graham, were both shot in front of their apartment building in the Queensbridge projects. Jungle survived but Graham didn’t. Nas’ focus was on moving his mother out of the projects and, thankfully, he was recruited by some of the best music minds in hip-hop. DJ Clark Kent, a music scout at Motown at the time, wanted to sign him, but the young MC didn’t have a demo. His résumé consisted of only his Main Source feature and a freestyle recording from his first radio appearance: on The Stretch Armstrong and Bobbito Show at Columbia University.

Stretch Armstrong was pulling double duty as a rap music scout for the Atlantic Records independent imprint Big Beat. Armstrong and Big Beat’s other scout, Rob Tewlow, also courted Nas. The two took Nas to Chung King Studios to meet producer T-Ray. That day, T-Ray worked on a song for MC Serch’s solo album (“Back to the Grill Again“). When MC Serch arrived at the session, he invited Nas to appear on the song. That’s when Nas’ life changed. He eventually signed to Serch’s production company, Serchlite, for a major label deal with Columbia Records worth $300,000 plus another $300,000 for publishing. He’d be tasked with delivering a debut worth its weight in gold.

Nas, being rap’s No. 1 draft pick, made Illmatic the most-anticipated album of 1994. Word was that the young phenom assembled an Avengers-like squad of the top producers (DJ Premier, Pete Rock, Q-Tip, Large Professor and newcomer L.E.S.) of the 1990s. The supporting cast alone was enough to attract the industry’s attention.

Then-record executive Steve Stoute remembers sitting inside his Volkswagen Fox repeatedly playing Illmatic’s Large Professor-produced single — a song he sees as a catalyst for Nas’ career. “I was a road manager at the time, but I wanted to be in the business when I heard ‘It Ain’t Hard to Tell’,” he recalled. “It gave me the same feeling I felt when I first heard Rakim, but much more profoundly. I couldn’t believe somebody could write that. I couldn’t believe a person of that intelligence and craftsmanship was alive.”

Outside of his advocacy for Five Percenter spirituality, Rakim’s impact on emceeing was primarily technical. He inspired rappers such as Kool G Rap and Jay-Z to push the capacity of a four-count by stuffing bars with more poetry. When Eric B and Rakim released their debut album, Paid In Full, in 1986, the act of rhyming over a beat seismically changed forever. No MC before Rakim used multisyllabic words to form polyrhythmic rhyme schemes that swam into the next. Inspired by jazz music’s manipulation of time and space, Long Island, New York’s greatest orator unshackled rigidity from the cadences of his forefathers and peers. Pioneering battle rapper Kool Moe Dee credits him for birthing “the flow.” What’s undeniable Black history is that Rakim revolutionized the art of rap.

It seemed like every rapper who came out of New York after Rakim wanted to be like him. Many tried. But Rakim himself saw there was only one successor.

“Large Professor brought him to Power Play Studios where me and Eric B. used to record,” Rakim said, remembering his first conversation with Nas in Queens. “There was something that just felt like my little brother was about to come into the game.”

Nas evolved what Rakim started.

With much of the East Coast’s early 1990s hip-hop flirting with a Timberland boot and black hoodie caricature, Nas became the poster boy for stark yet vivid portraits of perilous Black and Latino life in the Rotten Apple. Although rappers such as Treach of Naughty by Nature, Fat Joe and the Wu-Tang Clan preceded Nas, their perspective wasn’t as voyeuristic or as cinematic (see “N.Y. State of Mind”). They also spoke for young adults with life experience outside of New York’s tri-state area. Nas was still a teenager and unfamiliar with the world outside of the Queensbridge projects. Personifying a caged sparrow, he sang so pristinely that listeners floated over the fact that he felt trapped.

“I need a new n—a for this black cloud to follow/ ‘Cause while it’s over me it’s too dark to see tomorrow.”

Nas’ prose elevated him from his peers. His references were scholarly (Aesop’s fables, the Leviathan, Medusa, and Jehovah). Even when his rhymes offered overt fiction for the sake of sport (“Sneak an uzi on the island in my army jacket linin’ ”), the innovation weighed supreme because it borrowed from the devil in great detail.

“Maybe [there was] an influence,” Rakim said. “But Nas had his own sound. What I felt good about was the direction he took. He was presenting himself as a lyricist and telling a certain story.”

On wonders like “The World Is Yours,” “Life’s A B—h,” “Memory Lane (Sittin’ in da Park),” and “Represent,” which were part-memoir, part-noir, Nas was incomparable. He weaved a tapestry using despair, toxic masculinity, and police brutality. He then exhaled and found space for hope, survivor’s remorse, insight and curbside wisdom that belied his years on earth and ninth grade education.

“Memory Lane” is akin to a truncated version of Claude Brown’s harrowing 1965 autobiography, Manchild in the Promised Land. Brown wrote about being one of many Black children born to former sharecroppers who fled north with the Great Migration and how their offspring were robbed of their adolescence by the chaos of slums. Brown’s words — “a misplaced generation of misplaced people in an extremely complex, confused society … and their endless battle to establish their place in America’s great metropolis” — mirrored those whose fate, decades later, lived and died in public housing. The way heroin plagued Harlem into degradation during the 1950s was echoed in the 1980s after crack cocaine left behind a generation of Black and Latino kids whose wonder years were collateral damage. This was Nas’ first childhood.

“He would never express the [negativity] in his hood,” Large Professor said. “We would just hear it come out in rhymes. It sounded so good that you didn’t think it was a call for help.”

Inspired by the film Scarface and powered by an Ahmad Jamal sample, “The World Is Yours” is the cry of a teen who knows that his trauma is his home and the one opportunity to escape is his ability to paint with poems. On “Life’s A B—h,” a 20-year-old Nas was artist Jean-Michel Basquiat fighting to live past 27.

“Nas kinda just tapped into that Iceberg Slim lane as a writer,” Large Professor said. “He was like, we gonna give ’em the blues, but written.”

An underappreciated virtue of Illmatic’s poetry is its usage and creation of intimacy. Intricately detailed observations, often from behind the metal safeguards of his tiny project window, made Nas’ purview intimate. The way he pulled listeners closer to both show and tell his world is masterful. His portraits are prime contributors to the album, which has aged over 30 years as perennial fine art.

“I always had an ethereal connection to Illmatic,” actor and rapper Joey Badass, who was born a year after Illmatic’s release, said. The 29-year-old remembers its influence on his debut 1999 (2012). Nas appeared on Joey Badass’ third album, 2000, 10 years later in 2022. “Growing up, I used to always see this iconic cover with this face of a little Black boy. That always drew me in because that boy looked just like me.”

The 7-year-old on the album cover initially dreamed of being a trumpeter like his dad, Olu Dara. Around the time that Nas’ father discouraged his oldest from playing the instrument to allow his lips to mature, hip-hop was rising at a feverish pace. With radio stations still a couple of years away from spinning rap, park jams were where the culture lived in the projects. Young Nas was mesmerized by the rap cipher but shy. Nonetheless, the neighborhood’s best noticed him. “He always had a book with him,” pioneering MC and Queensbridge native Roxanne Shante said. “He was always reading or writing something. When others were loud, he was quiet. When others were singing, he was reading. He always stood back and watched everything.”

Nas’s keen vision and hometown pride resulted in Illmatic resuscitating the Queensbridge name. Seven years before, Boogie Down Productions’ “The Bridge Is Over” drove a coffin nail into its rap feud with MC Shan. Queensbridge was fairly quiet until Nas took his projects global by turning his practice of penning letters to incarcerated friends into an unprecedented rap concept. “If Illmatic was in a burning building, I would run in there and grab ‘One Love,’” Joey Badass said. “I remember going to school every morning. I would just listen to it over and over. It was like discovering a drug.”

On the Q-Tip-produced classic, Nas speaks the names of Queensbridge homies in and out of the penitentiary, paving a path for future Queens borough legends from Mobb Deep to N.O.R.E. “Nas was already writing me [in prison],” Cormega, who was mentioned on “One Love,” said. “So I knew the album title and certain songs before they came out. I saw the video on TV, but [inmates] had CD players. It was a proud moment.”

If ever there was a Queensbridge tour of the Illmatic album, the “One Love” stop would be “The Hill.” On 10th Street between 41st Avenue and 41st Road were public phones used for collect calls from prison. At one point, the Q101 bus to Rikers Island ran directly through the projects. The bus stop stood on the corner of Shante’s 12th Street building. “When I heard ‘One Love,’ I was literally in tears,” Shante said. “It was my whole life right there in one song. [Nas] said, ‘I know it’s hard doing your bid/When the cops came you should’ve slid to my crib.’ Everybody would open up their doors for someone when the police were coming.”

1994 was an unequivocal golden year for hip-hop albums. GOATs were born. OutKast and Da Brat were introduced. The Notorious B.I.G., Method Man and Warren G released debut albums. Redman, Scarface, UGK, Gang Starr, and M.O.P. all dropped full-length records that year. No rap album has matched Illmatic’s trajectory of megawatt street buzz to generational influence. After the early 90’s eclipse of West Coast rap from the likes of Dr. Dre and Snoop, Nas’ composition helped shift the spotlight back to the mecca of hip-hop.

“What me and Nas was able to do was put time into a capsule,” Rakim said. “We personified what was going on in New York City. To feel that energy and then manifest it, it’s crazy. You were successful if you could paint that picture, and we were both successful at that.”

According to cultural purists and interlopers, Nas set forth to make a perfect album and overachieved. The era’s critical authority on rap, The Source, agreed, bestowing Nas’ firstborn with its finest album rating of five mics. Writer Minya Oh praised the debut as “monumental.”

In 2024, Illmatic’s immortality is undeniable. Yet as feverish as the anticipation was, its 1994 sales suffered from too much East Coast love. Going platinum in the ’hood meant you were a victim of bootlegging. MC Serch claimed that he once discovered a garage containing 60,000 pirated copies of Illmatic, the same amount as its first-week sales. The album wouldn’t have one successful radio single or hit gold status for nearly two years. It required five more years and a beef with Jay-Z to be certified platinum.

Premature infancy aside, the album beams today as one of the biggest. It inspired Jay-Z’s first single, “Dead Presidents”; helped open the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival with the premiere of the documentary Time Is Illmatic; conceived 2024’s pantheon of MCs (Drake, Kendrick Lamar and J. Cole, who released a tribute, “Let Nas Down” in 2013); and gave a project kid a creation that appreciated into a foundation for cultural iconography and eventual generational wealth.

“That album is just the greatest hip-hop album ever made,” Stoute said. “Those stories are timeless. Those beats are timeless. We still talk about Shakespeare. We still talk about Picasso. We still talk about Basquiat. We still talk about masters of craft. And Nas is a master of his craft.”