Live At The Barbecue
I don’t know how to start this shit anyways.
There’s been a million words written about Illmatic over the past thirty years, from the tedious (“This is my first listen! I was -9 years old when it came out!”) to…something something Nas and Nietszche in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy? And people riffing for a page on misreadings of lyrics (it’s “leaking out my grapefruit, troop” not “grapefruit Troop,” I don’t think they even made jackets that color. I actually googled this.) It’s scraped down to bottom of the peanut butter jar level: “Premier sampling Donald Byrd’s “Flight Time” is alluding to how Nas wants to escape the projects.” (That’s cool but…it’s not how sampling works? No one samples based on the song title?)
Illmastication has become a cottage industry: anniversary tours, reissues, books, documentaries, roundtables, memoirs, interviews. How about a New York State Senate Resolution honoring it, why the hell not.
We know all the who, the when, the how, the where. We’ve even watched “The Thief of Baghdad.” But I think there’s still a couple of facets deserving a look.
Static on the Wool Fabric of History
There’s so much lore and discourse that certain accepted truths have calcified that are just wrong.
- “Illmatic is the last great New York album”: It’s not even the last great one of the ’90s? Do folks think Wu-Tang were…actually from feudal China? It’s the capstone of the Golden Age, but it’s not the end by any stretch.
- “Nas embeds hip hop history in the record like no one else”: Eh, he does this, but the recycling, renewal, reinterpretations of samples, phrases, callbacks, and history is pretty universal — even down to classic drum breaks; Blueprint called these “the jazz standards of hip hop.”
- “Nas is the greatest storyteller of all time”: Ghostface’s “Maxine” would like a word. Ice Cube at his peak was just as great — the difference is he’s ALWAYS YELLING AT YOU. Nas gave us “One Love;” Cube was “The N***a You Love To Hate.” And Ghost always sounds like he’s five heartbeats away from cardiac arrest.
The difference is that raspy, quiet voice: Nas pulls you close, you’re there with him. He comes through on Illmatic without having to find this, it’s fully formed in every way (there’s no early Kid Wave tape, just that handful of Nasty Nas guest verses, demos and freestyles).
Nas takes it to the human, to the heart: PE were political billboards; Rakim was God; Kane and LL immaculate princelings. (Wu-Tang was: what if posse cuts were albums; what if The Seven Samurai was a musical genre.) He’s bringing it down from the era of superhero regalia, its elevated postures: Rakim’s Dapper Dan gear, Flavor’s clock, Run-DMC’s Adidas. It’s just Timbs and Army jackets.
I keep coming back to: why this record and not another, as an all-time classic? Yes, the beats are flawless, from a murderer’s row of the best of the best. Yes, it’s a brutal depiction of the crack era, the racist carceral state, project housing; of the contradictions and hopes of young Black men growing up in bleak, violent and unjust environments. Yes, Nas’ use of language and rhyme schemes, layered rhythms, enjambment and lyrical compression is dazzling.
But why Illmatic and not The Infamous? (Even though Nas had a year headstart.) Why not Hard to Earn? Why not Ready To Die? Biggie cracked the door to his heart some, but in the end he’s the impervious, invulnerable Juggernaut, with the Crimson Bands of Lumberjack (With The Hat To Match). Because Nas was willing to be himself, doubtful, unsure, exposed — no ice grill; the thousand yard stare is regretful. It’s his sense of place, detail and raw autobiography, and how these combine to become universal, and personal for everyone.
Concrete Articulations
This German professor says Illmatic “is a concrete articulation, to borrow Latour’s phrase.” I don’t know from Latour, but I like that. It’s not just musique concrète, it’s mots concrète. Here, in the ghetto, it’s just a bad situation. Call it what you want, it’s just a concrete articulation. The vinyl sides are 40th Side North b/w 40th Side South, for the borders of Queensbridge Projects. It’s confined in place and time, but not much has changed since. He said in the Time Is Illmatic documentary:
I gave you what the streets felt like, what it sounded like, tasted like, smelled like — all in that album. And I tried to capture it like no one else could…something that was proof that I was here.
Queensbridge has a unique rap pedigree: Marley Marl, the Juice Crew, Havoc and Prodigy, Shan, Roxanne Shante, Capone, Tragedy, Craig G, etc. Sacha Jenkins said:
The place itself became this mythical land that was one part Motown and two parts Hades…His imagination had an interest in putting your hand on the heartbeat of the projects — the pain, pride and politics of it all.
There’s been loads written about QB Houses’ history, its poverty, its crime — in 1986, it had the highest murder rate of any New York project. It’s the largest in the world. The album delves into every aspect; it’s about the place itself, but also the racist socioeconomic political forces and legacies that made it that way. It’s harrowing, tragic, chilling, but also bold, funny, and alive. Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote:
Whether it was baseheads hustling broken amps, a friend murdered over a sheep coat, or trading a 40 bottle for a lotto ticket, Nas could line up the perfect details to fill in the dark comedy of ’hood life…No MC ever saw so much on an ordinary street.
Hip hop is always territorial (I guess you could get into the underlying loss of a motherland). In the years leading up to Illmatic, Nas had stake in the Bridge Wars — Shan vs. BDP for claiming hip hop’s birthplace, its dominant epicenter. And Illmatic drops on the cusp of the East Coast/West Coast war: almost every review mentions Doggystyle, they’re put head-to-head. But Nas doesn’t just represent for QB, he represents it himself — he’s superimposed on QB on the cover, entwined and embedded.
QB is six blocks, and on Illmatic there is nowhere else—except prison, and he makes repeatedly clear there’s no substantial difference: even my brain’s in handcuffs (the Q101 bus to Rikers used to run directly through Queensbridge projects). It’s one compressed, compacted landscape — autobiocartography.
In the Time is Illmatic doc, Nas’ brother Jungle tells the story of the night he and Ill Will were shot — himself wounded, the other killed—and even today he can’t believe their mother didn’t move afterwards, that he had to keep walking the same paths where their blood had spilled. All those traumas embedded in the blocks, flashbacks triggered everywhere they look—concrete articulations. “Memory Lane” is a literal linking.
That sense of place, its people, and the degree of granular detail, is fractured and impressionistic, all-encompassing in sweep, like dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer. It’s why he gets compared to Gordon Parks’ or Jamel Shabazz’ photography; to reportage — it’s poetic journalism of a war-torn place, like Michael Herr’s Dispatches. And, Nas is rightly called cinematic:
I listened to rap, so would write poems, and also I would write scripts — my own type of movies. So it came to being a choice of one or the other, and I went for rap instead of the movies. It was cheaper and easier to rhyme on a beat than to make a movie. I always wrote scripts as a kid. I always liked to tell vivid stories.
Illmatic is called cinema verité (but it’s not really like Battle of Algiers, please stop saying that). He’s The MC With A Movie Camera, word to Vertov. There’s the worn-out cliché of rappers comparing their blocks with the Vietnam War — he said to Rolling Stone: “I was a very young cat talking about it like a Vietnam veteran.” Of course, the difference between works that capture the richness, the beauty, the brutality and tragedy and insanity of that war and records like Illmatic is they’re from the Vietnamese side. But there’s a connect with Coppola saying about Apocalypse Now: “My film is not about Vietnam, it is Vietnam.”
Nas’ writing captures vivid, visual moments — running from a shootout with his jammed pistol, then: So now I’m jetting to the building lobby, and it was full of children, prob’ly couldn’t see as high as I be. And on “One Love,” an Ozu-level capture of complex emotions in a silent pause, in a convo trying to give advice to a twelve year old dealer:
Shorty’s laugh was cold blooded as he spoke so foul
Only twelve trying to tell me that he liked my style
Then I rose, wiping the blunt’s ash from my clothes
Then froze, only to blow the herb smoke through my nose
The kid hasn’t listened to a word he’s said. He’s not sure whether to say more, to try and make him see where he’s headed. He doesn’t, there’s no point. Just: keep an eye out for the police, and, one love.
Illdungsroman
There are no great Black American novels about the crack epoch yet, only grand hiphop operas — Big’s Ready to Die, Raekwon’s Cuban Linx, Jay’s Streets Is Watching, and the grandest of them all, Nas’s Illmatic. That album made explicit for all time the difference between the MC who thinks in dithyrambic parables and the one who thinks in lucid paragraphs and lurid photographs. Illmatic owns the crack moment as surely as Hendrix owns Vietnam. Nas is truly hiphop’s Scorsese, a gifted storyteller who didn’t so much seek out crime and mortality as those subjects found him, cornered him, said, You, Negro, You, have been chosen by the ancestors to essay this tale like Homer did Ulysses’s.
There’s a tradition and throughpoint of albums that capture their time, that’s raw talent jumping out the box, that’s popping with singular voice, that gives the sound a huge shove forward. Autobiographies that capture their momentary zeitgeist, forever — legacy records. It goes something like Illmatic, Cold Vein, good kid, m.A.A.d city, Ratking’s So It Goes, Amani x King Vision Ultra’s An Unknown Infinite, and SKECH185’s He Left Nothing For The Swim Back. There will be more, as long as there are youth struggling against the confines of life, of rough starts. They’re also stunning debuts, that give their all, virtuoso displays vibrating with youth, hungry in the way only a young person can be, on a level we haven’t seen since the one prior.
Nas’ hunger isn’t for cash, fame, shorties or escape (yet) — it’s for something more than that. As Q-Tip said, “hope is nestled in all the grimy shit.” It’s escape through the art of rhyming itself, and wanting to make his mark, which is transcendent rather than the fatal nihilism of most street rap: it’s redemptive and resistant. He switches his motto. There’s emergence, growth, deciding who he wants to be. I woke up early on my born day.
Nas’ life story would’ve been ripe for an autobiographical novel: the ex-Navy trumpet player father who left them, the hard-working mother who always had a plate for anyone. Dropping out of school, staying home with his parent’s eclectic library of classics, Afrocentrism, politics: an autodidact. The younger brother, and the best friend — Ill Will, with whom Nas writes and records raps, the Devastating Seven breaking crew, watching the jams at the park. Small-time crime and life in QB. And then, Ill Will shot and killed, and Nas taking their dreams forward, to the record, escaping the projects. Bringing his father to the studio and saying “play something that reminds you of when me and Jungle were kids.”
The coming-of-age story, the bildungsroman — the ‘novel of formation’—classically has four stages: cataclysmic event, journey, conflict, development and maturity. Aiming guns at all my baby pictures. Bildungsroman is about wanting more, a lust for life, escape, the wildness of youth, but also pouring in everything, every last bit of your life so far.
But poet Joy Priest defines the difference for the Black writer:
In the Black bildungsroman, the narrative arc does not result in the child arriving at maturity or adulthood because the Black child lacks the freedom to come of age naively, and must, from the beginning, possess a wisdom of the conflicts and dangers inherent to adulthood, namely the violence that results from a societal creed of white superiority. The Black bildungsroman presents an arc at the end of which the Black child has become adept at surviving such a society. Rather than a “novel of education” or a “novel of formation,” the Black bildungsroman is a collection of preservation or a collection of survival.
Michael Eric Dyson similarly calls this africeture: “the practice of people of African descent writing themselves into existence.”
Illmatic’s been compared to a lot of novels: Invisible Man, Native Son, The Harder They Come, Go Tell It On The Mountain. And it fits with, and maybe inspired, more recent ones — Jackson’s Residue Years, Diaz’ Drown, La Valle’s Slapboxing With Jesus.
But an album is not really like a novel at all; it’s much more like a collection of short stories — self-contained parts with different characters, maybe the same narrator/main character, overarching themes but not a throughline of plot from start to finish. And, like Joy Priest says, Illmatic is about survival, not maturing: an illdungsroman. It’s also so defined by time and place — mapping where he came from down to the last square inch. So what’s a linked short story collection, that’s a sort-of-bildungsroman, where the city is a character on every page, where every line is etched in steel, and is a hands-down classic? Fam, that’s James Joyce’s Dubliners.
Eighty years before Illmatic, a twenty two year old Joyce penned a fifteen-story collection that follows a range of characters from childhood to middle age. But they don’t develop or mature; they have epiphanies but no resolutions. It’s about Dubliners boxed in by poverty, strict Catholicism, the legacies of British colonialism, and booze; scheming and drinking and pimping and suffering — and trapped, trying and failing to escape. Joyce wanted it to “betray the soul of that hemoplegia or paralysis which many consider a city.” Its stripped-down style boots forward modernism; T.S. Eliot said it “destroyed the whole of the 19th century.” It’s a vision of urban and spiritual decay, semi-autobiographical, giving tiny moments in normal lives.
You want me to match them up, story-to-track, one by one? Don’t test me son, I’ll fucking do it. “Memory Lane”? That’s “Araby.” That sample on “Represent”? That’s the snow falling in “The Dead.” Straight up, shit is real and any day could be your last in the jungle.
I’m saying though: Illmatic, Dubliners — nostalgic and loving, but also suffused with deprivation mentally and physically; square-foot-level embedded in place; and everyone wants something more, wants to escape. There ain’t nothing out there for you. Oh yes there is: this.
Represent
Jon Caramanica said: “Illmatic became something of blank slate…It became what the listener wanted it to be as much as, if not more than, what Nas intended it to be.” In Shortie’s original five mic Source review:
Nas’ images remind me a lot of personal memories and people, both passed and present, so the impact goes beyond just the entertainment aspect. All this may sound like melodrama but it’s not just me. I’ve been hearing similar responses all over. While “Memory Lane.” is my shit, my homies claim “The World is Yours.” and if you’ve got peoples doing time, then “One Love” may hit you the hardest. There’s nothing wack though, just different intensities for different people to relate to.
Rap is often about sublimating the self, going only for self — the ice grill. Necessary armor for survival. Nas didn’t do that, and we made him pay for it. He does the opposite, fulfilling Kafka’s maxim: “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.” It’s a cold world out there, and he wants to warm us, back to the grill again, live at the barbecue.
Illmatic hinges on Nas as a person we came to know, that made emotional bonds with every listener. Illmatic became a mirror that everyone saw what they wanted in it. The chorus of “The World is Yours” isn’t just for him, it’s for all of us, it’s a call and response.
Nas was lauded as a Black public intellectual, a street prophet, a poet laureate, hip hop’s savior; “One Love” is put up next to The Color Purple and The Prison Diaries of Ho Chi Minh. He’s compared to Borges, Langston Hughes, Calvino, Chandler, Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, Walt Whitman, the list keeps going…a ridiculously heavyweight comparative pantheon.
He had to represent on so many levels—what a burden of expectation to live up to. There’s a lot of discussion around the representation trap for writers of color: that they have to represent their community’s entire experience, that their work has to have race and racial justice forefronted. Nas had even more than that on his shoulders, he was also supposed to be lifting up all of hip hop and those it champions, gives voice to. He became the symbol of all that he put into the record, and everyone added their own personal, intellectual, political and musical crowns on top of that, on top of his head.
No wonder everything that followed was many false starts and stops, confused and muddled, flawed. Illmatic was perfect for everyone because it was personal for everyone.
The Ill Tarot
Everyone has their Illmatic story, and this one is mine.
By ’94, my crew had left New York: Maestro had fried his brain behind the crack pipe and bounced for Maryland; Z broke out for the Arizona desert behind a heartbreak on a John Grady Cole type beat; Chickenstein had packed in his punk rock drummer/language poet bag to become a West Coast corporate lawyer. I lived alone in a tiny studio on Clinton Street, the shape and size of a small boat, maybe twenty steps end-to-end.
Old Dominican guys used to play dominos under the bus shelter in the rain, or sit on their stoops Sunday mornings nursing hangovers with a bottle of Heineken in one hand and a Clamato in the other, alternating sips. Every block between Houston and Delancey was heroin dealer territory, 24/7/365. Kids in oversized jeans and kicks as pristine and futuristic as spaceships on every corner hissing the flavor: Poison, poison, poison, fire papi, fire, O.J., money, got that O.J., shit is murder. Assassin, assassin, yeah boy that’s me. For a while I’d shake my head no and they’d snort Money, you lyin’, c’mere. You lyin’ papi, get back here. One time this kid threw up his hands and yelled “Man, you NEVER buy from me!”
After a while though, I was snorting, I was smoking. I was stuck, locked in place. I was caught by the devil’s lasso. For many years I’d regularly consulted the I Ching, or Book of Changes, that ancient Chinese oracle that through the toss of three coins produces a hexagram of wisdom, guidance. But lately it kept giving me basically:
Fire Above, Wind Below
Under the willows, the rōshi counselled his disciple:
You’re sitting at home doing this shit?
Stop fucking around and be a man.
If the I Ching couldn’t help me, I decided to see what Tarot cards could do. But I hated all the hippified decks I found, so I made my own. Japanese handmade paper and copper paint from Pearl Paint on Canal for the backs and edges. For each face, I had a couple milkcrates of photos, The Family of Man, an atlas, a Consumer Reports illustrated calendar, and found a stack of National Geographics on the street.
I had a little ritual for working on these (drug addicts, and Tarot readers, are all about their little rituals): Illmatic in the CD player. Sprinkle some dope on a square of aluminum foil, put a glass over it, wrap the foil up. Lift the glass, light up the foil. Press play on “Genesis.” Sound of a rattling subway. Flip the glass over, punch a cut straw through. Inhale, nothing lost to the air. Hector from “Wild Style” berating me right while I’m chasing the dragon. I liked Nas and his crew bantering and partying; it was like having them in the room with me.
Heroin smoke is more twisted than that of cigarettes or candles, its wisps strong and defined, like ink paintings, the color more white than grey. A little snort for a chaser, razor taps matching Premo’s stabs on “NY State of Mind.” I can still taste that shit.
Fifty-six cards of the Tarot are the ancestor of modern playing cards: four suits of Minor Arcana that go from ace to king. The other twenty-two are the Major Arcana, a key of points on our path towards enlightenment — The Fool’s Journey.
Card 0: The Fool is a youth about to step off the edge of a precipice, starting the journey, power before it manifests—half man, half amazing. It’s the start of the illdungsroman. Here is Nasty Nas, pre-Illmatic. Think of the youth as Spirit facing unknown possibilities of self-expression as he enters the world.
Nas said the meaning of ‘illmatic’ is: That shit is a science of everything ill. He advances to Card I: The Magician, who draws power from all four elements—earth, air, fire, water; MCing, DJing, graf and breaking.
The hand holding the magic wand is the ego-consciousness reaching up for power while the other hand points to earth, as if the Magician wills earth’s forces to be subservient to him. Or, it might be said that with one hand he reaches up to take the hand of the Infinite for accomplishment in the higher realms, while he reaches down with the other to encourage the evolution of the lower kingdoms — thus uniting Spirit and matter in eternity.
It took two years to make all seventy-eight cards, froze from heron in the nose, scissors and glue and photos everywhere, Illmatic on repeat. Heroin is dozing in a warm bath of pleasure, it’s like dying and being grateful for dying, over and over. Sleep is the cousin of death — dope is the elder that connects them by blood.
Fourth of July, I went to watch the fireworks streak the sky with jellybean explosions and came home along brown sweaty streets. Fired up half a bag, fired up “Genesis.” I heard a squeal, a yelp, cut off, and a quick scuffle from downstairs — my apartment was just a flight up from the lobby. I looked out the peephole for a good minute, but nothing in its view. Went back to Nas and the cards and the nod.
The day after there’s two plainclothes detectives at my door: a girl was raped downstairs, did I see anything, did I hear anything? I still think about this. I could’ve stopped it. But I was lost inside myself then, trying to touch something elsewhere. To begin like a violin, end like Leviathan.
Alt-Nas
Card X is The Wheel of Fortune, three ever-turning circles: creative force, formative power, and the material world. The perpetual motion of a fluid universe. Life is like a dice game.
Everyone is on that multiverse shit right now. It’s easy to postulate an Alt-Nas after Illmatic, where he resists the temptations of that Nāḥāš, Steve Stoute; where he doesn’t get cartoon character $$ for eyes.
Nas was supposed to make his followup with Marley Marl, but he was too lazy to drive upstate or Connecticut or someplace. It’s easy to imagine that album, linking Nas to the vein of traditionalist boom bap. It cements him as standard bearer of ‘real rap’ — in exactly the way Stoute didn’t want: highly regarded but not moving units.
The second most likely scenario, the one everyone still dreams about, is where he does the whole album with Premier (they just dropped a 30th anniversary track together). Maybe they go deep and hook up with his father, other jazz musicians — it’s Buckshot Lefonque or Jazzmatazz; better than those—Nas’ Blowout Comb.
Maybe It Was Written delves deep, it’s as Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is to Dubliners. Maybe it’s the record everyone thought they wanted. But the second album that ‘keeps it real’ doesn’t do numbers; doesn’t have a hot radio single. Columbia drops him. There’s not the prolific run. Maybe Nas disappears; Illmatic becomes one of those if-you-know-you-know joints like G-Dep’s Child of the Ghetto (with its own purposefully Illmatish cover). There’s chinstroking on and off for years about “whatever happened to Nas?”—a cautionary tale about trying to maintain artistic integrity in the music biz. “We weren’t ready” etc. etc.
Maybe he spends decades in some civilian gig, quietly amassing a basementful of records and honing immaculate, hand-carved rhymes. Maybe he re-emerges with a wholly different Stillmatic around 2012 that blows everyone away. But of course, psychocosmically, this happened: he was called Ka and the record was Grief Pedigree.
The cover of Illmatic is a graphic sampling of the cover of the Howard Hanger Trio’s A Child Is Born.
The Howard Hanger Trio put this out in 1974, Through A Glass Darkly in 1970 and a self-titled in ’77, and that’s it. It’s superlative, mournful jazz, mostly on par with what 24-Carat Black did for funk/soul. The records aren’t on streaming, they’re long out of print. There’s zero info out there about them. Maybe the alt-Stillmatic samples their best cuts, like “God of Grace.” Maybe it sounds like that “New York Is Killing Me” remix with the added Nas verse, off Gil Scott-Heron’s from post-crack comeback, that last-gasp swan song I’m Still Here.
Then would follow a lot of hair-pulling and beating of chests around ‘how did we let Nas rot away in silence for so long,’ critical reappraisals and so on. It’s so clear how it would play out you can smell it on your fingertips.
But, of course, in our universe, what followed was It Was Written: the subject of as many debates as Illmatic has hagiography. And thirty years of his rollercoaster discography.
In the end though, we can put all that shit aside and just appreciate this one record, from one time, by one young man, for what it is.
