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  Illmatic

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  Illmatic

  Matthew Gasteier

  2009

  The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc

  80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038

  The Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd

  The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX

  www.continuumbooks.com

  33third.blogspot.com

  Copyright © 2009 by Matthew Gasteier

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other wise, without the written permission of the publishers or their agents.

  Printed in Canada on 100% postconsumer waste recycled paper

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gasteier, Matthew.

  Illmatic/by Matthew Gasteier.

  p. cm. - (33 1/3)

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4411-6336-3

  1. Nas (Musician). Illmatic. 2. Nas (Musician) 3. Rap (Music)--History and criticism. I. Title.

  ML420.N344G37 2009

  782.421649092--dc22

  2008055441

  “One ever feels his twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”

  W.E.B. DuBois

  “The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Black/White

  1. Endings/Beginnings

  2. Youth/Experience

  3. Death/Survival

  4. Individual/Community

  5. Fantasy/Reality

  6. Faith/Despair

  7. Tradition/Revolution

  8. Breaks/Flows

  Gift/Curse

  Acknowledgments

  On a basic and apparent level, this book would not have been written without Nas, in my humble opinion the greatest emcee of all time. I owe him thanks not just for Illmatic, but for a career that continues to challenge and entertain.

  Huge thanks have to go to DJ Premier, Pete Rock, Q-Tip, AZ, and their respective managers, and a particularly strong thank you to MC Serch, who patiently and graciously dealt out his finest wisdom. This book owes a huge debt of gratitude to Adrian Covert and Etan Rosenbloom, who encouraged me when I was on the right track and steered me back when I wasn’t. Thanks also to editor David Barker, who believed I could write the book I wanted to write, and Dave Park and Brandon Wall at Prefix, who gave me the freedom and support I needed to get to the point where I was.

  Finally, thank you to Audrey, my co-writer and best friend, who walked me through my ideas, talked me down from the ledge, and guided me towards an infinitely better book.

  This book is for Jeffrey, with whom I would have had a lot to talk about.

  Introduction

  Black/White

  I am white. Over a decade ago, when I began to listen to hip hop—really listen, outside of popular social contexts that the music had already seeped into across white America—this mattered. As a teenager in a predominantly white environment, there were two sides of the pop divide: rock and hip hop. Kids defined themselves by the music they listen to (still do), and even more so, outsiders defined them as well. Listening to hip hop was essentially associating oneself with the black community, How could I pretend that my life paralleled the lives depicted in this music?

  I didn’t yet know Rakim’s famous line “it’s not where you’re from, it’s where you’re at,” which would become a battle cry of sorts for any hip hop head who didn’t have the stereotypical “black American experience.” But it wasn’t any sense of personal evolution that prompted my expanded musical palate other than the simple freedom that comes with not allowing the music you listen to, the movies you watch, and the art you consume to define you. Music stopped being about the image and the lifestyle—the social ceased to have priority over the personal. It was no coincidence that I didn’t really love music until I began to love hip hop: the same barriers had been holding me back.

  Now, a decade later, things are very different. I wasn’t the only one that figured out that you can listen to hip hop without belonging to the hip hop culture, and as the genre has continued to “dominate popular music, anyone interested in the social climate of America ignores hip hop at their own peril. Articles in The Source have evolved into articles in The New Yorker have evolved into articles in National Geographic. However naively, it is no longer important as a hip hop listener to identify yourself as white. Hip hop, created primarily by black Americans, evolved from black American music, is no longer Black music. It is American music.

  This is, of course, far from uncharted territory. Since the dawn of recorded music—and before—music made by black Americans has made its way slowly but surely into mainstream America. Jazz, swing, rhythm and blues, and finally rock and roll were all co-opted by the parallel culture. Though the path of these genres was not as, well, black and white as traditional history would imply (Big Mama Thornton may have recorded “Hound Dog” before Elvis, but it was written by a couple of Jewish kids), the oppression of black artists because of the need for a paler face behind the music is undeniable.

  The difference between these earlier trends and hip hop’s new path is that the newer art form was the first major post-civil rights musical jump to emerge from a black community. Right as hip hop was ready for primetime, with the release of 1984’s Run DMC, MTV started playing videos by black artists and stretching out from their rock-exclusive ethos. Since that major shift, black artists don’t have to worry as much about finding an outlet for their work, and therefore white artists have had little opportunity to step in and fill a void.

  The audience for hip hop now looks like America (and I have never bought the decades-long assumption that the genre is primarily consumed by white suburban youths)1 b
ut the face of hip hop remains very much a black one.

  Now the debate has shifted from what it means as a white American to listen to hip hop to what it means to engage in hip hop culture, to take an active role in performing, promoting, and—where I come in—critiquing the genre. As hip hop moves slowly up the chain of respectability, hip hop writers have gained a higher level of exposure. With such exposure comes a degree of cultural power which, whether the writer is white or black, must be constantly examined. The intellectualization of art can have a dangerous impact on artistic intent when it is presented to the consuming public. Greater exposure to an audience that doesn’t know where to begin means a generation of writers is setting the agenda for hip hop; they are the ambassadors of the culture. For white writers, this is even more important, because—assimilated or not—hip hop culture is and always will be a product and a reflection of black America. What does it mean to represent and evaluate a culture to which you do not belong?

  Perhaps the greatest irony of this conversation is that critics and writers have (almost) always been removed from the works that they covered. In Cameron Crowe’s fictionalized memoir Almost Famous (which was originally titled The Uncool), the legendary rock critic Lester Bangs, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, tells the protagonist to beware of making friends with the bands. “They make you feel cool,” he tells his protegée, “and hey, I met you, you are not cool.” There has always been a separation between the artist and the audience that is more than just a stage or a television screen, a certain hierarchy that has birthed rock stars and fan clubs alike. But that separation has now been strengthened by an impenetrable divide. You can always learn to play the guitar, get a new haircut, do the hottest drug, or buy the latest kicks. You might even get the girl (or girls) in the end. But you can never change your race.

  On an episode of Ego Trip’s The White Rapper Show, a program I followed with both low- and high-minded interest, producer Prince Paul hosted a game show where each of the remaining six white rappers had to test their knowledge of black culture. One of the questions was “Black stereotypes that black people secretly believe to be true.” The results were expected: better rhythm, bigger penises, etc, and the whole thing was casual and light-hearted. But beneath the cavalier exploration of racial politics, indicative of the new generation’s open acknowledgment of what was once taboo, there was a kernel of truth. In order to maintain their dominance in hip hop, black artists have accepted certain stereotypes about themselves; that their experience in America is more “real;” that the best way for a black man to establish himself in the world is through brute force and sexual prowess; that their musical talent is natural and unique.

  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 sta
tus 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.

  Chapter One

  Endings/Beginnings

  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.