Nas's Illmatic (8 page)

Nas is not exploiting Queensbridge on
Illmatic
in order to leave it, but the nagging hypocrisy between the glorification of a struggling community (simply by shining a light on it) and the honest and basic desire of any intelligent ambitious individual to leave that same place has tailed every rapper since realism and hood-repping crept into the music. Nas acknowledged this struggle in 2004 when he said,

I listen to
[Illmatic]
and it makes me say, “wow, this is what a young man was going through in this society. He’s not bragging about carrying a gun. He’s not bragging about selling crack. He’s not bragging ‘cause he’s been through Hell, he’s going through Hell and he’s expressing it.’ I feel sorry for that young man that I was at 17 years old. I feel sorry for him, and I also feel happy for him that he made it.

Nas most likely means “made it” in the most general way here. By the decade-anniversary mark of his first album, the rapper had already released seven albums that reached platinum status, met his soon-to-be wife, and raised a daughter. But he’s also saying he made it out of the ghetto, he made it out of adolescence, and finally, he made it out of the cycle of oppression and destruction that so many of his friends could not escape.

Illmatic
, then, is an album about the fundamental questions of youth, the process by which a boy or girl takes in the good and bad, beautiful and ugly, passion and indifference, triumph and failure of a community and uses all of it to make the decisions that inform their identity as an individual. The following three chapters are an exploration of the album as a blow-by-blow account of this experience, with Nas as the protagonist constantly pushing back against the pitfalls of his journey, bravely declaring “life is parallel to Hell, but I must maintain.” Here was the boy, becoming a man, becoming a king, becoming a prophet. Nas would mature on his own. If New York hip hop wanted to come along, that was fine with him.

“And you’re sitting at home doing this shit? I should be honored a medal for this. Stop fucking around and be a man. There ain’t nothing out here for you.”

“Yes there is. This.”

Illmatic
opens with an exchange between Zoro and his older brother Hector from
Wild Style
, the independent hip hop film made during 1981 and 1982. Made with mostly amateur actors, and featuring contemporary hip hop icons, most notably Grandmaster Flash cutting up records in the kitchen, the film was the first opportunity for the culture to introduce itself on the big screen. Consequently, it’s been sampled frequently by acts ranging from the Beastie Boys to Cypress Hill, but no sample is as famous as
Illmatic
’s opening lines.

Zoro is a graffiti artist, so when he says “this,” he is gesturing towards his bedroom wall, filled with his own tags and artwork. But it could just as easily be turntables, records, or—as in the appropriated context of the introduction to Nas’s album—books filled with rhymes. Hip hop in both Zoro’s
life and Nas’s life is their escape from reality. Hector is home from boot camp, waiting in his bedroom with a gun trained on the window that Zoro climbs through: their lives are both clearly full of confrontations with the reality that surrounds them. What they have chosen to do is what separates them, and Hector clearly feels his decision is the more mature one.

This battle, between two brother s from a struggling family, goes hand in hand with the battle of
Illmatic
. Here is the immediate rush that comes with the realization that you are no longer as young as you once were, that you must make the decisions that will affect the rest of your life, that now is the time to “stop fucking around and be a man.” Zoro has retreated into his own imagination; his reality is wrapped up in fantasy, splashed in bright colors across train cars and bedroom walls. Hector has offered up his body in the ultimate sacrifice, because he believes the only option in his reality to make it out of the neighborhood is to join the military. Like these two conflicting worldviews, the record is about surviving, about getting out, but it’s also about retaining the energy that pulses through the intro, holding onto the dreams of youth.

“N.Y. State of Mind,” the first real song on the record, sets up Nas’s battle with his perception of self-potential, his fantasy of a better tomorrow, and the reality around him. In the first verse, his steps are careful and deliberate. He depicts a war zone. “I’m suited up in street clothes/hand me a nine and I’ll defeat foes.” He twists humor out of dark situations. “On the corner bettin’ Grants with the cee-lo champs/laughin’ at baseheads tryin’ to sell some broken amps

He slows into the chorus with two couplets that are vintage Nas:

It drops deep, as it does in my breath

I never sleep, ‘cause sleep is the cousin of death

Beyond the walls of intelligence, life is defined

I think of crime, when I’m in a New York state of mind

Here Nas tightens the battle between fantasy and reality. In the third bar here, Nas argues that the safe place he has created in his head to develop himself as a person is nothing without his surroundings. Life is not you; it is the moment when you confront everything around you. And though never sleeping has immediate implications of nervousness and constant vigil, the line digs deeper than that. When you sleep, you dream, and dreaming here is equated with failing to survive the daily struggle.

Still, Nas begins the second verse by admitting that he’s “havin’ dreams that I’m a gangster, drinkin’ Moets, holdin’ Tecs” and carries on for three more bars before dropping back down to earth. “But just a nigga,” he says, “walkin’ with a finger on the trigger.” If you only listen casually, you might miss it. After all, his brags of “investments in stocks” and “winnin’ gunfights with mega cops” sound natural in today’s oversized kingpin battles.

It only makes more sense when you realize these two sections—one of fantasy, the other of reality—were actually two separate pieces from demo songs Nas had recorded. The reality side of the combination begins “I’m a Villain,” the early Nas record. The fantasy comes from “Just Another Day in the Projects,” which stretches the dream out into a full verse (“but on my head was a price/I make the bad guys in
Miami Vice
looks nice.”). In the second verse, he wakes up and realizes he passed out watching
Scarface
, the Brian DePalma-helmed gangster epic that has become iconic in the hip hop community. He proceeds to document his real life, “just another day in the projects,” which involves his far more familiar brushes with the law and trips to the store for phillies.

This section of “N.Y. State of Mind” is conceptually similar to the structure of “Just Another Day in the Projects.” But by making the division more subtle and, for his protagonist, more jarring by removing the chorus break, the emotional impact is stronger, and the contradiction between his fantasy and his reality more apparent. It forces a more powerful reaction when his inability to reconcile who he is in his mind with who he is “beyond the walls of intelligence” breeds anger and stress that boils up until it explodes. “Whenever frustrated I’m a hijacked Delta,” he says.

The cinematic qualities of “N.Y. State of Mind” are clear, with scenes sweeping through building lobbies and hallways mixed with vivid dreams of glamor and violence. Even without
Wild Style’s
front-and-center nod, it’s obvious that Nas loves film. He begins “One Time 4 Your Mind” by explaining “when I’m chillin’, I grab the bhudda, get my crew to buy beers and watch a flick, illin’ and root for the villain.” Not even one verse into the record the first reference to
Scarface
pops up when Nas says he’s “like Scarface sniffin’ cocaine holdin’ a M-16.” The film is referenced again with the title of “The World Is Yours,” a rallying cry for Al Pacino’s soon-to-be kingpin (ironically, Nas watches the non-violent leader Gandhi’s biopic in the first line of the song).

Art would imitate art in the other direction four years later, when Nas starred in Hype Williams’s
Belly
. The film is a complex challenge to the violence and self-destruction of the Black community it depicts, yet the stylized camera work is so beautiful that it is hard to look away when even the most disturbing events are displayed, severely lessening the film’s impact. In a side scene, Nas’s character Sincere visits an old housing project where there is a twelve-year-old boy simply referred to as “Shorty.” Though the conversation is not, exactly the same, this scene is essentially adapted from the
third verse of “One Love,” thirty-six bars that are arguably Nas’s greatest moment on
Illmatic
.

It’s not surprising that Williams would want to pull the tone and style of this verse into a movie. The words are undoubtedly beautiful, but Nas uses setting, dialogue, and visual cues like a filmmaker crafts a scene. Williams saw more in it, as he explained to Vibe: “I wanted to include it in the movie because it represented everything I wanted to say about youth culture and its relationship to rap music. These aren’t just lyrics that these guys write; they are a part of something bigger.”

This indicates that what Williams heard in the verse was something akin to Dr. Frankenstein meeting his monster, but Nas seems to be angling for something less about his art form and more about his environment. Placed after his notes to friends in prison, the story is more about coming to terms with what he has become. He looks at the kid slinging rocks and smoking blunts and sees himself, not just a younger version, but a stagnant version. Unless he strives for something different, this is his reality. “One Love,” with its reserved hopefulness, its struggle for redemption in the face of sin (not to get ahead of ourselves), is an acknowledgment of the life that Nas leads and the reality that he fears he will never escape.

Nas’s foray into cinema was bound to happen. He’s frequently stated in interviews that he wants to go to film school, and even in verses that haven’t been sampled for films it’s easy to see why. As an emcee he has a truly cinematic eye. Along with the earlier mentioned specifics and story arcs, his music is nothing if not visual, conjuring up images of broken corners and hazy days. “N.Y. State of Mind” plays like
cinéma vérité
, weaving its way through stairwells, lobbies, and streets crawling with cops and crews, while “One Love” is mournful and poetic, like a Terrence Malick film. And like the inherent
contradiction of creating truth with a medium that projects the illusion of movement at 24 frames per second, Nas’s reality is clouded through youthful but confident eyes.

Nas called his record a “reality storybook” before it was released. Unsurprisingly, this is a perfect way of putting it. “Storybook” has a certain connotation: one thinks of childhood tales of fantastic places and adventures. “Reality” is what we hide from children, what we think they are not able to handle. We protect children from the real world, or at least strive to do so. Yet Nas has laid out his childhood reality on “N.Y. State of Mind,” and throughout the record. His dreams of leaving this reality behind are hindered by his youth at first, and then later by the terrifying realization that this is all he knows, that his reality is defined by his stories.

Of course, to anyone who hasn’t experienced what Nas has,
Illmatic
is more storyboo than reality, a visual and visceral representation of a world they will never experience. One person’s reality is just as easily another ’s fantasy. Even Nas himself has been criticized by other s as someone who never actually lived the life he raps about in his songs. This argument seems useless in the face of such insight as Nas has provided throughout his career, but the idea that Nas could internalize a collective experience might even enhance his own mythology. It is a true talent that can absorb another person’s reality into his own mind and spit it out in such vivid detail that even people who could never imagine what he is talking about form an emotional connection to the experience.

Ultimately, the irony of such a specific narrative is that the situation, as little as five years later, had shifted within even Nas’s own community. The reality Nas was escaping was one of the worst periods for inner cities in U.S. history. The Reagan years had seen crack flood city streets across America, and violence, particularly among young people, was
at stratospheric heights. Regardless of what caused the downturn of crime in the nineties, the results were real. Crime was down, drug use was down, murders were down. The reality that rappers depicted in their songs turned to hyperreal representations of the muted battles that had dropped relatively underground. Though no one would argue that the problems had gone away—or even lowered to anywhere near acceptable levels—the coincidence of hip hop’s rise to the top and a sharp drop in violent crime found fantasy trumping reality in the media.

Walking through Nas’s neighborhood today, those changes are apparent. White Flight has reversed itself, as second-generation suburbanites have found themselves drawn to the metropolis, and New York City has found itself struggling to keep up with the upscale housing demand. This south-westernmost section of Queens might still have the requisite check-cashing storefronts and pawn shops a few blocks away, but hovering over it all is a sleepy white woman on a billboard cloaked in soft sheets and resting her head on her pillow. The ad pledges safety and cleanliness in those new condominiums by the train, a new and different kind of N.Y. state of mind.

The harrowing account Nas spoke of had become an historical document on the cusp of this change. Listening to the album now you can hear all of the exhaustion, desperation, and anger that had been building for the past twenty years, not just in Nas’s life, but in the lives around him. But you also hear hope, redemption, and, in the distance, tomorrow. How few records can be said to evoke a specific time in American history, not because they were played a lot or they started a movement, but because you can listen to them and get a sense of what it was like to live in a specific time and place? If it is still far from actually experiencing it, then it is just as close as reading a book or watching a film about the experience, hardly
an achievement you would expect from a pop record, much less such an immediate and entertaining one.