Nas's Illmatic Read online

  Chapter Three

  Death/Survival

  By the early nineties, New York hip hop was on its last legs. Public Enemy was mired in controversy after Professor Griff’s anti-semitic remarks clouded the release of the classic Fear of a Black Planet. Early pioneers like Eric B. and Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, and Run DMC were fading out of public consciousness. The only New York sound gaining any significant mainstream traction seemed to be the Native Tongues’ jazzy and smooth take on the genre, crystalized in A Tribe Called Quest’s The Low End Theory, released in 1991.

  That year, around the same time MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice reached the top of the charts, NWA released their long-awaited follow-up to their influential and politically charged Straight Outta Compton. Named backwards as Efil4Zaggin for obvious reasons, the album was the group’s extreme and surrealistic attempt to carry on without their most accomplished lyricist, Ice Cube, who had only recently parted ways and decided to work with Public Enemy’s production team, the Bomb Squad, on his solo debut, AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted.

  NWA’s album was also the first major hip hop record to be released in the brave new world created by Soundscan. Because of the new automated reporting system, Billboard no longer had to rely on reports from music stores to find out exactly how much every record sold. The result was a shocking number-one debut for an album studded with gang rape, frustrated and confrontational violence, and some of the darkest beats and rhymes ever to top the charts, before or since. Quite simply, until that point, no one had known how much money was in Gangsta Rap.

  The album’s surprise success set the stage for producer Dr. Dre’s solo debut the next year. The Chronic’s mix of smooth choruses and confrontational lyrics was instantly heralded as the new sound of hip hop, and come late ’92, early ’93, there was hardly any room for the east coast in the G-Funk landscape. Certain acts were able to attain moderate success, like Redman, Onyx, and Fu-Schnickens, but outside of hardcore hip hop circles, most New York acts went unheard and completely unrecognized.

  Nas was having trouble himself. Most artists view a certain level of exposure as the step towards perpetual success: that guest-starring role on Law and Order one day, an Oscar the next. But after his guest appearance on “Live at the BBQ” garnered a little buzz, the harsh realities of the music industry started to sink in. Despite shopping homemade demos around town, Nas was largely MIA in the hip hop community. Still barely known outside his small group of acquaintances, he was seemingly back to square one on his chosen career path. As MC Serch told rap magazine Grandslam in 2003, “he was an enigma in hip hop. No one knew how to get in touch with him.”

  Serch rose to fame with 3rd Bass, the legendary group best known for featuring one of the first interracial lineups. Like Eminem later, the group would go after any white (and therefore fair game) rappers they could find to skewer, beginning feuds first with the Beastie Boys (over a beef inherited when they arrived at Def Jam) and then with Vanilla Ice, legitimately if obviously accusing him of stealing and watering down Black culture. However, also like Eminem, Serch was an unusually talented lyricist whose abilities stretched beyond his often comical persona and subject matter. He also had an enormous amount of respect for the craftsmanship and skill required to excel in front of the microphone, so when he heard “Live at the BBQ,” he wanted to meet Nas. “That verse is still one of my favorite verses of all time,” says the emcee over a decade later. “It wasn’t only me, I think everyone wanted to get in touch with him.”

  Before he could, the Queensbridge emcee, struggling to make inroads at the various New York labels, suffered a major loss. Nearly a year after his debut with Main Source, on May 23, 1992, Nas’s brother Jungle was shot and his best friend and frequent collaborator, Will “Ill Will” Graham, was murdered. Graham had been attending a party where he was supposedly disrespecting a young girl. When the girl called her friends to come defend her, things escalated, and Graham was shot in the back.

  It was a defining moment for Nas, on the cusp of fame, hoping to make his way into the world at large and defy the odds to which Graham would succumb. In ’94, Nas was interviewed in the pioneering hip hop mag Rap Pages by Bobbito, the legendary radio DJ. Bobbito (aka Robert Garcia) had passed on Nas while working A&R at Def Jam because he didn’t think the young rapper, still struggling to break through and make rap a career, was ready. By the time of the interview, Bobbito and Nas had a mutual respect that allowed Nas to feel comfortable to speak freely. Nas’s reflections on Graham during the interview are a rare personal take on the tragedy from a public figure who is Notonously private:

  X equals unknown. I can’t even build on that, that shit is deep. A nigga been with you all your life, since you was young. I grew up in my man Will’s crib. He used to have a big speaker. He’d play records like “White Lines”—that bass line, he’d slow it up and we’d rhyme. He’d cut it up. We used to listen to Awesome Two, Chuck Chillout on 98.7, Mr. Magic on BLS, all the old-school shit. As we heard rappers come out and progress, in our own little world we was making tapes for only us to listen to. As the years went by, we had like little albums, so we was progressing right along with them. Will was my DJ, but he used to rhyme. He used to do everyone’s style that you hear now. He used to just bug and rhyme like B-Real, start wylin’ like Onyx, then slow it up like Rakim. He had crazy styles off the top of his head. I was the one who would sit down and write, so it took me longer “to come up with shit, but we were making tapes. You grow up, we slinging, making a little bit of cash, just the average shit. He got locked up, then he came home and we was blowing up again. Then, boom, the nigga’s gone. I had these pictures of how shit would be when he grew up. How shit would fall into place. The cipher is incomplete now, cuz my man is gone. Even though he’s under, I’m still standing – that’s understanding. Now I go to his crib and his moms is there, and I just feel him. Something that he left there. I look at his clothes, his equipment, his turntables, and I can feel him. So it’s still there. I’m gonna represent and keep it real.

  There are few Americans outside of the inner city that, at 20 years old, are confronted with violent death among peers. According to the Department of Justice, in 1992, the year Graham was murdered, black people were nearly ten times as likely to be victims of homicide as white people. Based on murder rates in the late 90s, when violent crime was at a relatively low point, 15-year-old black males in Washington, D.C. had a staggering 1 in 12 chance of being murdered by the time they were 45, while white males during the same time frame had a probability of 1 in 345. Even black teenage males in neighboring Brooklyn, with the lowest inner-city murder rate in the country, had a 1 in 53 chance of being murdered.

  These statistics are well-known but rarely understood, particularly in discussions of hip hop that take place outside of the environment in which they are more than numbers and concepts. Most cursory coverage of the music in the main-stream press is limited to the cavalier attitude with which death and murder is treated, ironically (but not coincidentally) mirroring the style of hip hop which receives the most attention from mainstream outlets such as commercial radio stations, MTV, and major record labels. This forms a simplistic narrative about “gangsta rap” with which to damn the entire genre, while simultaneously wrapping it up in a neat, rebellion-ready starter kit for the young masses. But the real, more complex story is one of serious but understandable contradiction. While there is certainly a great deal of violent and masculine posturing in hip hop, it is balanced with a deep reverence for the dead, the constant presence of those who have passed, and a strong if commercially muted commitment to ending the cycle of violence.

  This seeming hypocrisy is one of the fundamental building blocks of hip hop. Some rappers faced with the violent culture forced upon them and their neighbors take to extremes. Legendary rapper KRS-One, who spearheaded the hip hop-based Stop the Violence Movement, began his career with his group Boogie Down Production’s debut record Criminal Minded. The album included the track “9mm Goes Bang,
” with the line “He reached for his pistol but it was just a waste/‘Cause my 9 millimeter was up against his face/He pulled his pistol anyway and I filled him full of lead.” Just an album later, faced with the murder of his DJ/Producer Scott La Rock, KRS released By Any Means Necessary, with the single “Stop the Violence.” More often, usually driven by the threat of lost record sales and radio play, rappers refuse to learn from these events and furiously hold on to the hyper-violent persona of the successful ghetto superstar.

  Nas walks the thin line between the two extremes. He can speak passionately about his fallen comrades, and yet on record, he might write a song where he receives a call about the location of an enemy and then goes to hunt him down and kill him. But even more mystifying is the casual violence matched up with the destruction it causes in one song. On “NY State of Mind,” Nas describes in first person shooting up his opponents: “Lead was hitting niggas, one ran, I made him backflip.” But this soldier-like narration drains of confidence in the next line when he realizes his actions have consequences: “Heard a few chicks scream, my arm shook, couldn’t look.” To the listener, this lack of omniscient judgment is confusing. Nas has put himself in the first person in his story, and created a situation in which he is doing something he seems to regret.

  But the point of Nas’s work is not to judge, but to represent. Often associated with gangs or a neighborhood, representing is used in the literal sense in the case of Illmatic. There is little perspective on the record because there is no room to stand back in Nas’s Queensbridge. On the song “Represent” he opens by saying, “Straight up shit is real and any day could be your last in the jungle.” This is simply a depiction of the only life the rapper knows.

  For attentive listeners, this is the best way to gain insight into the experience. From Biggie admitting “sometimes I hear death knocking at my front door” to Talib Kweli talking about “cities where making 21’s a big accomplishment,” rappers have taken the place of reporters who have long ago moved on to fresher and more popular stories. When Nas says “I woke early on my born day, I’m 20, it’s a blessing/the essence of adolescence leaves my body now I’m fresh and/my physical frame is celebrated cause I made it/one quarter through life, some Godly like thing created,” he’s not just happy it’s his birthday.

  For these artists, the paradox is not their warring affinity towards violence and revulsion of its impact—which are simply two sides of their overall reality—but their very survival. The culture of guns and death is their existence, and they know better than anyone their chances of making it out alive. As Nas’s once-rival Jay-Z said, “this is the life I chose, or rather the life that chose me.” Their only choice is to hope to be the last one standing. In this sense, rappers who rap about death while preaching against violence are not walking contradictions, but existential contradictions, in that they are still walking.

  It’s not the triumph of his own survival or the numerous shout-outs to his fallen friend over the course of Illmatic that have the most impact on the listener. The album is packed with the paranoid, desperate, harrowing experiences of an average resident trying to last another day. There’s the stomping claustrophobia of “N.Y. State of Mind,” where he maintains “I never sleep, ‘cause sleep is the cousin of death,” and “One Love’s” emotional confession of a frustrated man telling his incarcerated friend “it kinda makes me want to murder, for real-a/I’ve even got a mask and gloves to bust slugs for one love.” The struggle portrayed is the seemingly endless and unwinnable race against the inevitability of death.

  Instead of bogging him down, the constant reminder of death seems to have made Nas more resolute. AZ, in his guest appearance on “Life’s a Bitch,” says as much about the quest for survival: “even though we know somehow we all gotta go/but as long as we leavin’ thievin’ we’ll be leavin’ with some kinda dough, so/until that day we expire and turn to vapors/me and my capers, will be somewhere stackin’ plenty papers/keeping it real, packing steel gettin’ high/‘cause life’s a bitch and then you die.” It’s in stark contrast to Nas’s pensive and somber description of sitting in his friend’s room, surrounded by all of his things, frustrated by a future that will never come. Yet even then he thinks of representing—his hood, his friends, his talents—and keeping it real. “He’s under, I’m still standing.” Violence and a call for peace, lost friends and passing time, death and survival. Without each, there would be no understanding.

  Death is a constant presence in Nas’s work, from his first verse to his recent Notonous statement/album title/marketing ploy Hip Hop is Dead. The multiple threads weave the passing of actual people in with ideas, movements, and even music. He seems to fulfill the meaning of his name by taking up the cause of protecting the latter, viewing himself as willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for hip hop when no one else wants to—or even can. On his recent remixes of “Where Are They Now,” Nas revives hip hop stars from the 80s and 90s like Jesus brought back Lazarus, hoping to save hip hop’s history to strengthen its future.

  Elsewhere, Nas is more literally focused on death, particularly murder. On It Was Written, his follow-up to Illmatic, he personifies a gun on the emotional and brilliant “I Gave You Power.” In the climax of the song, he jams on his owner in a courageous moment of rebellion against the purpose that has been forced upon him, the purpose to take life (“My creation was for Blacks to kill Blacks,” he says). But the gun is quickly picked up by someone else, certain to be used in subsequent killings. The song shivers from mournful piano chords and weeping strings, stuck in a cycle of violence and death that seems inescapable. It’s a quiet moment of anger and compassion, producing an unspoken connection between one death—Will, the protagonist’s owner, or any black man—and the survival of not only those around them, but the ideas that sent them to their graves.

  Nas would eventually name his record label after Ill Will, and he has never stopped talking about him. For the cynical outside viewer, this is no different than name-checking his Queensbridge upbringing, a street-cred ploy, the badge he carries with him to get a free pass when younger, hungry emcees come after Nas (a self-confessed homebody) and his commitment to the rugged lifestyle. But listening to him talk about his experience outside of the jaded mindset would quiet even the most antagonistic critic. Nas, an infinitely talented emcee with little need for a mythology, gained very little in May, 1992. But he did, just before his career broke wide open, lose a friend.

  The universe does have a way of balancing out. A few months later, for however short a period of time, Nas would gain a vital friend in MC Serch. “I didn’t actually track him down,” Serch recalls. “I was in the studio working on my solo album [Return of the Product], and Stretch Armstrong and Reef, who were A&R at Atlantic at the time, brought a bunch of emcees. I was with Red Hot Lover Tone5 and Chubb Rock in the studio, and Reef and Stretch brought Nas, Akinyele, and Percee P to spit on ‘Back to the Grill Again.’ The end result was a posse cut similar to Nas’s wax-debut “Live at the BBQ.” His presence is noticeably different though. Unlike the earlier cut, where Nas had seemed anxious but confident, this less-remembered Nas persona is gruff and forceful. Though his voice is still instantly recognizable, the 17–year-old is playing with his voice, trying to stand on his toes to measure up to the adults in the room. The result is a deeper, gravelly snarl of a delivery, uncomfortably matched with Nas’s usual flow. It’s a rare opportunity to see a future great experimenting with approaches, but it would be more satisfying if he hadn’t already nailed his persona in his first and only previous attempt.

  There are still huge connections between Nas’s first two posse-style appearances. The emcee remains focused on shock, claiming he’s “waving automatic guns at nuns.” He keeps a Tec-9 in his dresser and he’s a “serial killer that works by the phone book.” Just months after his friend was killed, Nas puts forth violent tales of murder and death. Yet unlike hyper-violent, shock-heavy records like the above-mentioned Efil4-Zaggin, or the more realistic ass
aults of Ready to Die, these dark fantasies are purposefully so over the top as to be totally divorced from reality. It may still carry a certain flippancy about death, but considering Nas was still a teenager, these are very typical subjects and styles.

  It’s a quick 12-bar verse, half the length of his last appearance, but with the exception of a few witty lines from Serch himself, Nas steals the song. At the recording, the young rapper reached out to more experienced Serch. Highly impressed with Nas’s flow, Serch was happy to listen. “Nas ended up staying behind…and then sat down with me and said ‘Atlantic is offering me a deal, I don’t really feel comfortable about the deal, I need your help,’” says Serch. “and I said Well, it would be an honor to help you.’ So I signed Nas over to Serchlite as an artist, and went to Columbia and went to see Faith Newman. I said I got Nas as an artist and we’re looking for a deal. And she didn’t let me leave the building until we had a deal in place.”

  Though Newman did, in fact, jump at the chance to sign Nas (whom she had already been looking to sign, once she tracked him down), the path did meet an early, infamous bump in the road. Def Jam’s Russell Simmons got the first look, but passed. “Russell’s famous line to me was ‘Mas sounds like [Kool] G Rap and G Rap don’t sell no records, so why would I sign a rapper that doesn’t sell no records?’ So I was like, well, I did the loyalty thing, I took it to my guy first and he passed. And I went on and went about my way.”

  While Nas readied early tracks for his eventual debut, Serch continued to provide Nas with opportunities. After his own record was completed, Serch was given the task of compiling artists for the soundtrack to an urban interracial love story called Zebrahead. The emcee turned music supervisor had supposedly originally wanted the lead role, a great rumor that Serch himself confirmed is not at all true, but it went instead to a young Michael Rapaport, making his big-screen debut. Though the movie received generally solid reviews, its low budget and unfortunate fate of following Spike Lee’s similarly themed (if almost totally different) jungle Fever guaranteed it would be quickly forgotten.