Nas's Illmatic (2 page)

With this cultural power at stake, it is no surprise that any white writer or artist would be viewed with great trepidation. Eminem, the great exception that cannot be ignored, has been (
Source
magazine race-baiting notwithstanding) embraced by the hip hop community. But the Detroit emcee did not do it through his lyrical dexterity alone. Eminem found a legendary voucher in the form of Dr. Dre. He also perfected a unique performance style: as Sasha Frere-Jones wrote in “Haiku for Eminem” after the release of
The Marshall Mathers LP
, “The way you sound black/when you
are conversating/but white when you rap.” This remarkable characteristic of the most popular emcee in history allowed him to become embraced by a pop community that wasn’t yet ready for hardcore hip hop while it simultaneously projected a non-threatening image to the hip hop community. Though Eminem still had problems—and will always have problems—being fully accepted, it’s this ace up his sleeve that is often ignored.

But to acknowledge this power dynamic within hip hop is to immediately understand the importance of the culture to a people that are underrepresented in the more conventional public sphere. Rather than attack this equation of blackness and The Cool, it is important to respect the tremendous contributions that black Americans have made to American music over at least the last two hundred years, and to address the issues of (in)equality that are the underlying roots of the impasse. In this context, black defense of their culture seems straightforwardly logical. If someone has a continuous history of stealing your television and claiming it as his own, the next time you see him in your house, you’re going to wonder what the hell he’s doing there.

This brings up a legitimate question: if I believe this does in fact matter, that the power dynamic between black artists and their cultural appropriators is a very real context in which any non-black-produced work must be examined, why have I chosen to write this book? First of all, when treated with the respect it deserves, black music is remarkably accommodating. There are few artists in hip hop who would care to restrict their listenership to black people, even excluding the obvious commercial limitations which such restrictions would entail. Hip hop likes ruling the world. Despite its constantly evolving trends, slang, and social mores, it is not an insular art form. The Hip Hop Nation’s appeal stretches well beyond its
borders, and even its most patriotic citizens rarely advocate immigration reform.

But more importantly, by stepping away from a culture, one hopes to understand it better. Which is, as I’m sure you were wondering, precisely where the subject of this book comes in.
Illmatic
is perfect for such an exploration. Unlike Public Enemy’s
It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
…and dead prez’s
Let’s Get Free, Illmatic is
not (transparently) political. Unlike Wu Tang’s
Enter the Wu Tang: 36 Chambers
or MF Doom’s
Operation: Doomsday, Illmatic
is not mythological. Unlike Dr. Dre’s
The Chronic
or 50 Cent’s
Get Rich or Die Tryin’, Illmatic
is not gangsta pop. Boiled down and focused, almost defiantly New York-born, the album is the vision of a black man growing up in the projects during the 1970s and 80s, specific almost literally down to a street corner, and yet immediately recognizable.
Illmatic
is hip hop.

I don’t just listen to hip hop, I love hip hop. I can spend hours discussing which Poor Righteous Teachers album is best, arguing over Common’s evolution as an MC, and evaluating the respective solo careers of the core Wu Tang. I wait months, sometimes years, for my favorite MCs as they continually push back their release dates. I cringe when Oprah or Bill O’Reilly insults a culture they do not care to understand or constructively engage with, and I am proud of Ml of dead prez when he goes on Fox News and presents an intelligent and positive voice. Sometimes I wonder if a day goes by when I am not evaluating the impact and status of the genre, when I am not discovering some new album or some unknown aspect of a complex and living art form that I consider to be the most important cultural development of the last quarter of the 20th century. But I am not hip hop.

Therefore, this is not a book about me. I won’t tell you when I first heard
Illmatic
, or what it has done for my life, or
why I couldn’t have made it through a tough period without the record by my side. Rather than partake in the culture, or conversely force the album into my world, I want to interact with this work of art in its own context. By doing so, one can ideally reconcile the conventional concepts of artistic expression with the new paradigm that hip hop has created, and which has become so misunderstood. I hope this does not imply that I aim to take an elevated position from above. It is not my intention with this book to expose the hypocrisy of hip hop, but rather the complex play of light and dark, good and evil, power and the powerless, that hip hop is able to accommodate.

Nearly twenty-five years after Run DMC established the public representation of the black male experience, hip hop has ridden that authenticity and Other status to pop dominance, the height of superficiality and acceptance. It’s a testament to the genre’s universality and multi-faceted mythology that its reputation has, for the most part, remained intact over that time. Unlike previous black American music, hip hop has maintained a high profile within the community for thirty years, while allowing itself to reach out not just to the rest of America, but the entire world, from Japan to Senegal and Sweden to New Zealand.

Why it has been able to achieve such universal success while maintaining its status in the inner cities is a matter for another book. That it can appeal to such a broad range of humanity, however, is at the core of Nas’s
Illmatic
, which is viewed with reverence by every version of a hip hop fan, from underground to commercial, New York to Los Angeles, conscious to thug. It is not because people do not recognize the duality of the album, the larger–than-life persona that stresses populist realism, simultaneously depicting two competing realities. It is because they see life in those contradictions, a
true depiction of the world around them. It is this complexity that
Illmatic
represents so well, and that I aim to capture from outside looking in.

In the year 1999, Nas was crucified. The emcee whose first verse on record included the claim “when I was twelve, I went to hell for snuffin’ Jesus” had done a 180, and was now wearing a crown of thorns, being taunted by peasants in the desert. It was all in the name of the video for “Hate Me Now,” the second single from Nas’s hastily reconfigured (after one of the earliest costly internet leaks) third album
I Am
… Shifting from ancient Jerusalem to the hood and then into the hottest/most ridiculous club in town, the video was flooded with girls, large and heavy necklaces, and fire…lots and lots of fire.

Hype Williams, the ubiquitous hip hop music video director whose sole feature-length film
Belly
co-starred Nas, was behind the camera for the controversial video. Puff Daddy (as he was then known) was the guest, lurking in the background, crouched on the awning, screaming at the camera, and, ultimately, swallowed by fur. He would be edited out of the crucifixion scene in the final edit of the video; an early airing on
Total Request Live
on MTV had ignored his request to be
purged. He had felt it would be construed as blasphemy; as a devout Catholic he felt people would believe he was inappropriately comparing himself to Jesus Christ. This indiscretion led to the now-legendary skirmish between Puffy and Nas’s then-manager Steve Stout, in which Puffy allegedly and poetically attacked Stout with a Champagne bottle.

It’s not just the live tigers, the multiple-set shoot, and the Jesus metaphor that send the video so far over the top. It’s the useless, self-important credits at the beginning, the Armageddon-like explosions on the streets of New York, and, most simultaneously hilarious and awesome, Nas and Puffy, hovering over it all on a grocery store overhang. Over the course of five minutes, the viewer must inevitably wonder how they got up there: was it a fire escape? Or were they lowered onto the awning with a crane?

The song itself, though laced with some classically Nas couplets, was similarly packed with braggadocio, down to the bombastic “Carmina Burana” sample that gets smacked around by doom-saying bass and stunted drums. It was, like the Champagne attack that followed it, indicative of the culture out of which it grew, where hip hop was reaching unforeseen heights and most success was being viewed through a rosy fisheye lens (again thanks to Hype). If you had said “bling” on
The Today Show
, no one would have known what you were talking about. Jay-Z wouldn’t go “Big Pimpin’” for another year. “Me and Diddy, we started the bling thing,” Nas told an interviewer in 2006. “I called myself the Bling King. My whole thing was to put on the bigger chain, to ice out the stuff.”

Out of context, Nas’s work on “Hate Me Now” seems wildly incongruent with his earlier output. The only conclusion most fans could arrive at was that the emcee had finally and completely Sold Out But within hip hop, Nas was moving with the times, reflecting reality—his reality—just as completely as
he had always been. Though
I Am
…, like every Nas album, boasted some of the emcee’s best work—first single “Nas Is Like,” produced by DJ Premier, is still one of his finest moments—the one-two punch of that disc and the quick follow-up
Nastradamus
left many of his hardcore fans behind. For those narrowly focused, wildly loyal traditionalists, his new persona signaled the complete transformation of the last great torchbearer of the golden age of hip hop. Nas was more Judas than Jesus.

Without knowing it, the plan had already been set in motion. In fact, in many ways,
Illmatic
, released five years before Nas was crucified, is the last gasp throwback, the end of the original hip hop era. Once Run DMC went global and hip hop began to get noticed, the traditional style of gritty drums, hard-hitting samples, and street-level rhyming found itself birthing styles that splintered off in new directions. Some were close siblings, like Public Enemy’s brand of confrontational, sample-heavy conscious rap and, further down the line, the smoothed-out jazz rap of the Native Tongues and Digable Planets. Other s were distant cousins like Teddy Riley’s New Jack Swing movement, or disowned children like pop act MC Hammer. But all struggled for the spotlight in the evolutionary race to the top of the charts.

Straight elemental hip hop was still a powerful center of respect in the early 90s; groups like Showbiz and AG, Gang Starr, and Pete Rock and CL Smooth had hit singles and received national notice. But with a few exceptions (the Wu Tang solo records, Mobb Deep’s debut) this would all change months after
Illmatic’s
release thanks to one record.

The Notonous B.I.G.’s
Ready to Die
was a new kind of crossbreed. Executive produced by Sean “Puffy” Combs (as he was then known), the album mixed the local reportage of
Illmatic
with pop hooks, party jams, and an arsenal the size of
a small militia. Unlike NWA’s records, Biggie managed to be authentic and powerful without being confrontational. He was dangerous without being troubling, authentic without being unpolished.

He was also, as Jay-Z would do with his later records, posturing, positioning himself as a larger–than-life figure that gave him the “rock star” mystique that would allow hip hop artists to cross over into mainstream culture. The real-life battle which turned tragic would only reinforce this image.
Ready to Die
, the infamous battle between Bad Boy and Death Row Records, and the subsequent deaths of Tupac and Biggie, would have effects on the hip hop genre and industry that are still felt today.

Ready to Die
had obviously been influenced to some degree by
Illmatic
,
²
but Biggie’s album had such a huge impact that Nas could not be unaffected in turn. When he went to record
It Was Written…
, his follow-up to
Illmatic
, an album with limited singing and no female presence, he knew to court radio with Lauryn Hill singing the hook on “If I Ruled the World (Imagine That).” He even flipped the Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of These)” for one of his most awkward and yet successful singles, “Street Dreams.” It had only been two years, but there was a lifetime between his debut and
It Was Written
… It appeared then, and is only more clear now, that the time for a record like
Illmatic
had come and gone.

In fact, tightly constructed albums that focus on lyricism and simple and powerful beats and rhymes are almost always compared to
Illmatic
. Artists reference the record when explaining why they want their albums to be short, their guest
appearance list even shorter. They say they want to project a unified sound, to present a realistic portrait of their existence. They say they don’t want filler, don’t want an album with the dance song, the love song, the compartmentalized song. When they say these things, they are speaking of
Illmatic
, but they are also speaking against the status quo. It is code for change in hip hop, for a revolution in thinking about success. Artists say these things often, but they rarely achieve success, commercially or critically. Certainly none of the albums that have been made in the
Illmatic
mold have been able to measure up to the original artistically, and even the gold standard itself didn’t actually go gold for two years-it took nearly ten to go platinum.

Yet people continue to try because they understand that the album signifies an ending. Hip hop has evolved, and whether it is nostalgia or true knowledge of the right path, artists and fans alike are constantly questioning that evolution. Nas’s debut was the moment when it all seemed possible, when the
Village Voice
, in a review titled “Myth Making,” would cross their fingers and hope for a reemergence of New York, the New York where hip hop began and once thrived. Nas’s album was Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message,” where “thinking of cash flow, buddah and shelter/whenever frustrated, I’m a hijacked delta” sits in for “don’t push me cause I’m close to the edge/I’m trying not to lose my head.” His rapping style was born of Rakim, where “I got a craving like I fiend for nicotine/but I don’t need a cigarette/know what I mean?” becomes “the fiend of hip hop has got me stuck like a crack pipe.” He knew what came before him, and a reverence for hip hop history is something the emcee has maintained throughout his career.