Nas's Illmatic Read online

  Inside the courtyards that each block of buildings contains, pathways lined with park benches and short fences surround a basketball court and a small children’s playground, the self-contained common ground of a massive community. These days, just a moment away from the city in the new gentrified New York, the nearby subway stop is surrounded by a different kind of self-contained community: luxury condominiums for white urbanites looking for a (relatively) cheap but convenient alternative to living in Manhattan. In this new context, walking around Queensbridge makes the buildings seem less like the rowhouses of Baltimore or the bombed-out towers of Chicago and more like the crumbling memory of basic affordable housing for low-income families.

  In pictures taken from above, however, the buildings stand out like castle walls protecting more castle walls, stretching off into the horizon, a cluster of green sticking out in the middle. The rooftops weave and dead-end from up there, thanks to a theory that a more innovative design would provide the residents with more sunlight, leaving each unit Y-shaped. Alternating between a ground-level starting point and the removed omnipotence of a bird’s eye view, it’s easy to see what Nas meant when he said “each block is like a maze full of black rats trapped.”

  But the playing field of Nas’s childhood is only one side of the story, for Queensbridge isn’t famous for its design, but for its culture. As he grew up, the soon-to-be-rapper was exposed to hip hop from the very beginning, putting him in a unique position. “A lot of the younger artists aren’t instructed in the education of hip hop’s history,” explains DJ Premier. “But where Nas lived in Queensbridge, he got to see MC Shan and Tragedy and all them right there every day. So he had schoolin’ right there in his own neighborhood.” In fact, this six-block micro-community had already cemented its place in hip hop history years before Nas began recording. This was almost entirely due to Marley Marl, arguably the first truly great hip hop producer.

  Born ten years before Nas, Marl was involved in hip hop for a few years before he broke into the history books with MC Shan’s “The Bridge.” Shan, also from Queensbridge, was a member of Marl’s legendary Juice Crew, a group that included early genre clown Biz Markie and Big Daddy Kane, arguably one of the five greatest rappers ever. Though its programmed drums and elementary cutting render the classic helplessly old-school, the song’s stark tone and boastful presentation were pitch-perfect. Separated from Illmatic’s “Halftime” by nearly ten years, it would not be hard to believe the two songs were made in different centuries (and with the current minimalist retro fads, it might even be hard to determine which came first). Yet both records are easily identified by their youthful exuberance, a level of hubris that can only come with early victories. For Nas and Marl, these victories were achieved in their neighborhood, where each had lived an American life long before they rose to city-wide attention.

  “The Bridge” wasn’t just famous because of its natural qualities. Its confrontational account of Queensbridge’s evolution as a hip hop destination was mistaken by Bronx-born KRS-One and his Boogie Down Productions as a claim to hip hop’s overall birthplace. The misunderstanding prompted a back and forth that has gone down in history as the first major hip hop beef, culminating with the first great response record “The Bridge Is Over,” a blistering and brilliant dis record that cemented KRS-One’s reputation as a dominant power in hip hop.

  But as the hip hop nation moved on, Nas spent his youngest years in Queensbridge. Though he first followed his jazz-musician father as a trumpet player (Dara would tell The New York Times years later that Nas had been “a little phenom” as a toddler), by the time Nas arrived in Queens he had lost interest. For a short period, Nas, like other New York emcees growing up around the same time, wanted to be a comic book artist, but once he hit double digits the young artist had found his calling. Nas told Jon Shecter of The Source about his awakening:

  The first time I heard rap was in my projects. In the park, outside, summertime thing, when I was crazy young. They had them old disco records and shit, cuttin’ that shit up. I witnessed all that shit, the beginning, you kno’m sayin’?

  His path was further mapped out for him when, in ninth grade, Nas dropped out of high school. His father had exited the scene a few years earlier, leaving Ann Jones to raise Nas and his brother , Jabari aka Jungle, alone. He had begun smoking weed, doing his thing hard “robbin foreigners take they wallets they jewels and rip they green cards.” He had already started recording informally with his best friend, Will “Ill Will” Graham, who lived upstairs from him, initially under the name Kid Wave. But it wasn’t until a couple years later that things began to really fall together for the emcee.

  “I met Large Professor in ’89,” Nas told The Source. Still a young man himself, William Mitchell aka Large Professor had begun to develop a notable production career, working with Eric B. and Rakim, Kool G Rap, and putting together his own group, Main Source. The producer was immediately impressed with the young rapper from Queensbridge.4 Himself a Queens native, Large Pro would take Nas under his wing, shopping his demo around and inviting him up to the studio during off recording times.

  This informal working relationship became official when Main Source’s debut, the undeniable classic Breaking Atoms was released in 1991. The record is notable for its quintessential rendition of the New York underground, displaying upbeat and highly lyrical party music bolstered by the two Canadian emcees Sir Scratch and K-Cut in the same year that NWA released Efil4-Zaggin on the other coast. But what allows the record to transcend its genre is Large Professor, who alternately works traditional boom bap tracks and stylized showcases using creative percussion, tweaked brass and strings, and semi-recognizable samples from an almost uniformly deeply soulful record collection. Like Prince Paul’s work on De La Soul’s Three Feet High and Rising, Large Professor mapped out a blueprint for sample-heavy hip hop that, due to artistically restrictive copyright laws, would be nearly impossible to recreate today. But Breaking Atoms may even be the more intricate of the two, allowing for a level of creativity that the best traditional producers have been reaching for over the past decade.

  Apart from a small but loyal following, the record has been largely forgotten, thanks to a few stints of prolonged out-of-print status and a Dr. Dre record that came along the next year called The Chronic. But its single, “Live at the BBQ,” is Notonous for featuring a 17-year-old Nas (or Nasty Nas as he was known at the time) in his first recorded appearance. The future mic god is noticeably nervous in the first few bars, but once the bulk of his rhymes spread out over the beat, it’s obvious why his is the lead-off verse. “Street’s disciple my raps are trifle/I shoot slugs from my brain just like a rifle.” “I melt mics ’til the sound waves over/Before steppin’ to me you’d rather step to Jehovah.”

  In this and other early rhymes, Nas is uncharacteristically tilted towards shocking punchlines: “Kidnap the president’s wife without a plan/And hangin’ niggas like the Klu Klux Klan,” or “slammin’ emcees on cement/Cause verbally, I’m iller than a AIDS patient.” While most of this can be understood through the prism of a young kid having a good time, part of this later abandoned style is undoubtedly Nas being smart as an emcee. As he would tell Rap Pages later, “I knew what I had to do if I was gonna rhyme on a ‘Symphony’ jam [a famous crew-style track from Marley Marl and friends]. The only way to catch somebody’s attention is to say the right shit. That’s how you gotta get off on posse cuts.” Either way, it’s a brilliant verse and a fitting debut for the 17-year-old rapper.

  If one were to ignore Nas and his standout performance, what’s notable about the song is how conventional its structure is for New York at the time. The scene was focused on crews and simple, rugged beats, thus the posse cuts of which Nas speaks. The concept of these ciphers was simple: stick four or five emcees on top of a driving rhythm and forget about choruses or hooks. It was a formula that would be perfected on Wu Tang’s Enter the Wu: 36 Chambers. But before RZA’s wildly skewed vision turned it into a
stark defiance of mainstream conventions, it was commercial suicide and creatively a dead end, because the tone was always insular and casual. New York was a traditionalist stronghold trying to put on a show with just beats and rhymes long after the West Coast discovered that if hip hop was going to jump the final hurdle into mainstream dominance, it needed to evolve.

  A major part of that evolution was the development of the star emcee, the lone figure at the front of the stage. Nas was a big step in that development, not just because of his obvious talent, but because he had the strength of a leader provided to him by learning the ropes small scale in his city within a city. It was a birthright that had been bestowed upon a musician’s son that grew up in the breeding grounds of hip hop. It’s no surprise then that when Nas became ready to rule New York, his ascendance to the throne was so effortless.

  Yet for a confident and ambitious artist, Nas is remarkably cavalier in interviews about his development as an emcee. Whether it’s in The New York Times or Vibe, he often emphasizes how natural and obvious his decision to enter into active hip hop duty was. It was all around him, he says, or it was what was available to him; oftentimes, he makes it sound like the local factory down the street, as if “my father worked there, my neighbors worked there, I guess it just seemed like I had to work there too.” His development seems so intertwined with his environment that the swagger splashed all over Illmatic seems less like an indication of who Nas is and more of an indication of what defined Queensbridge.

  Like GZA of the Wu Tang Clan, another of the most lyrically skilled rappers in history, Nas was initially secretive about his talent, afraid of what other people in the neighborhood might think (GZA, who has a powerful and distinctive style, initially hated his voice; it’s hard to imagine Nas hearing his smooth and smoky delivery and feeling the same way). On “Halftime,” Nas spits “back in ’83 I was an emcee sparkin’/but I was too scared to grab the mics in the parks and/kick my little raps ‘cause I thought niggas wouldn’t understand/and now in every jam I’m the fuckin’ man.” This last word emphasizes a double meaning for Nas, who in two couplets had evolved both from outsider to ringleader and from child to adult: man and Man at once.

  But such a quick twist of phrases belies the true experience. If Nas’s environment stoked his youthful pretensions, it also gave him the crash course in emotional and spiritual development that millions of inner-city kids are exposed to in every city across the country. “I was just barely 18 and I was already thinking about being retired,” Nas told Vibe magazine on the tenth anniversary of the release of Illmatic.

  I saw friends of ours—crackheads who were hustling for us then—being choked to death right in front of us by the police bringing them into their van. I saw my man, may he rest in peace, hustling while his moms smoked right in the next room. He’d hand her shit so she didn’t have to go outside looking for crack and get into trouble.

  This kind of an experience is extreme but nevertheless not a unique example, and levels of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, depression, and drug addiction are relatively high in low-income, underserved black neighborhoods. The latter is obviously and unfairly emphasized, not only because it has negative impacts that extend out of the black community, but also, some would argue, because it is the only way for young black men to profit within their economically depressed communities. As Biggie would famously put it in “Things Done Changed,” “either you’re slinging crack rock, or you’ve got a wicked jump shot.” The Bad Boy philosopher left out his own option, though: hip hop was that real opportunity for young black men to have their voices heard.

  In fact, because of hip hop’s influence in the mainstream culture, there is a convincing argument that the inner-city drug trade and its corresponding failed war on drugs is the yin to hip hop’s yang in the American consciousness, with very little else seen from these living communities that contain the full spectrum of life found in any neighborhood. Nas says as much on “Represent” about the two major signifiers of black culture: “somehow the rap game reminds me of the crack game.” These are both the most apparent ways for an ambitious young black man to gain power in their community and beyond. It’s the reason why the genre has become such a powerful and positive tool for the disenfranchised, particularly for those who consciously reject the destructive alternative. In the same article where he declared his soul’s history in Africa, Nas said, “I sit down and write my shit like Clinton is about to call me to the mike. Like I could tell Mr. Rudy Giuliani [New York’s then-mayor], ‘Yo, bitch, fucking bitch-ass nigger.’ Know what I mean? Like when I rap, everyone can hear me.” This is a’ remarkable thing to believe as any twenty-year-old, not to mention one who is a black American from the projects of New York City.

  It is this power that hip hop gave Nas, and so many other black artists. The paradox of Nas’s life in Queensbridge was in its ability to convince Nas that he could achieve his naive, youthful dreams, while giving him an intense and, for the average individual, dream-crushing experience, one that by all accounts should have ruined him like so many of his drug-slinging (or drug-taking) brethren. “If I see how Fat Cat [a kingpin from the 80s] did it,” Nas said a few years ago, “if I see how hardcore he was…then you see that one day you’re going to have to be like them, or even stronger than them.” For Nas on “Life’s a Bitch,” that path ends in one of two ways: “niggas I used to run with is rich or doin’ years in the hundreds.” Instead of following the path, Nas took the road less traveled.

  There is every indication that Nas didn’t think of himself as a young man any more when he made Illmatic. One song takes a trip down “memory lane,” another fondly remembers his “first piece of ass smokin’ blunts with hash.” In fact, nearly every song finds the twenty-year-old reminiscing over one past triumph or another . After all, if Illmatic is about any one thing, it’s about the experience of growing up in Queensbridge, of “runnin’ from cops” and “hangin’ out in front of cocaine spots,” “laughing at baseheads tryin’ to sell some broken amps.”

  Yet here is certainly, as numerous reviewers have pointed out, a portrait of the artist as a young black man. On “Halftime” he (responsibly) dodges responsibility: “I won’t plant seeds, don’t need an extra mouth I can’t feed/That’s extra Phillie change, more cash for damp weed.” His intro tells him to “stop fucking around and be a man.” It seems throughout the record like there is no end in sight, yet Nas constantly seems focused on his future and the potential he has to “excel” and “then prevail.” After all, not all is lost when he says he still has time to “switch my motto.”

  As Nas has matured and grown as an artist over the nearly two decades since his first appearance on wax, Queensbridge has never been far from his mind, or his pen. This is no surprise in a genre that (over?)values pedigree and roots (not to mention street cred), but it’s notable in Nas’s case because of the significance of his hood and the length of his careen the emcee has been out of his projects now as long as he was in it. But Nas is forever tied to Queensbridge, not just because it was the place he spent his youth, but because it was the academic experience that forms the basis of everything he says about hip hop, Black America, and, most importantly, himself.

  It is most likely a coincidence that the defenders of the first hip hop battle, between KRS-One and Marley Marl, and (arguably) the most famous hip hop battle, between Jay-Z and Nas, would both come from Queensbridge. With the commercial success of Brooklyn and the historical significance of the Bronx, certainly Queens feels stuck in the middle, unable to assert itself as the dominant power it certainly is. Yet this isolation has proven fortuitous at each step of hip hop’s history. Here is where Run DMC felt confident enough to take hip hop national, where Nas was solemnly convinced at 20 years old that the East Coast had not seen its glory days pass it by, where 50 Cent converted street-cred into mall-cred.

  It is easy when telling a musician’s story to settle into the conventional narrative. Most of these narratives rely far too much on
the origin story. We believe, as a collective audience, that somewhere in an artist’s past is the answer to his talents, the true meaning of his work. Hip hop, because of its obsession with the “before” picture of its stars, depends almost entirely on the origin story. This is, perhaps, why hip hop and comic books go so well together: each depends upon an emotional and life-altering ordeal to create true heroes. So Superman’s exploding planet and Batman’s murdered parents don’t seem so different (metaphorically) from murdered friends and bullets in the jaw.

  The story of Illmatic just happens to lend itself particularly well to the conventional narrative, not just because Nas grew up in such an important and oft-referenced place, but because the album is essentially about his beginnings. To judge a book by its cover, here is a seven-year-old Nas, superimposed with a picture of Queensbridge; one reviewer said it was as if he literally and metaphorically had the projects on his mind. More likely, he was merging the two images because they were, in his mind, one and the same. Nas was Queensbridge itself, and now he was introducing it to the world, moving product that had been created by years of living out the real-life hip hop origin story.

  It’s impossible to know whether Nas would have achieved the same level of success corning out of Brooklyn rather than Queensbridge, a community that gave him a wealth of knowledge in just two decades of life. Certainly such a talent couldn’t have gone undeveloped, but the natural persona Nas presents with an objective eye and a steady pen are at the very least as much nurture as nature. With his performance on “Live at the BBQ,” a very young emcee had proven skilled and experienced well beyond his years. The Bridge was far from over.