My Top 10 Albums of the 90s: (7) Illmatic - Nas

[This is the fourth in a series of ten posts. The list'll be revealed as entries are written.]

Today, it’s impossible to look back on the world of hip hop from outside of the East Coast/West Coast duality: the turf war not only permeated nearly all of the important rap to emerge during the nineties lyrically, but also claimed the lives of at least two of the era’s most iconic performers – Biggie Smalls and 2Pac – and both in dramatized, violent fashion, at that. It’s easy to forget, then, that the during early nineties, following the spectacular success of Dr. Dre’s The Chronic and Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle, the East Coast scene found itself in a state of critical and popular decline that threatened to permanently surrender both profit and posterity to Los Angeles. With both sides of New York’s rap scene (the spare brutality of Run D.M.C. and the playful intelligence of the Native Tongues movement) seemingly having run their course by the time of the release of A Tribe Called Quest’s classic Midnight Marauders in 1993, a reawakening was called for. As it happened, the call would be answered almost overnight with the release of two debuts soon turned universally acclaimed masterpieces: the Wu Tang Clan’s Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) and Nas’s Illmatic. The two share in common an uncompromising honesty about the ugliness of life in the gang-dominated inner city, and an equally uncompromising, eloquent sense of humor in the face of these challenges. But where 36 Chambers employs a spare production style – one whose harsh minimalism would set the tone for much of the East Coast gangsta rap to follow – Illmatic features a sound indicative of the stylistic crossroads that characterized its time. The album points ahead to many late 90s hits with moments of larger-than-life, sample-based production (including a virtuosic interpolation of Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature” on the closing track, “It Ain’t Hard to Tell”) while elsewhere retaining the jazziness that permeated the vibrant alternative scene of the first half of the decade. The result is a fascinating, eclectic foundation for Nas’s rapping itself, which instantly announced him as one of hip hop’s foremost MCs and certainly stands tall among the greatest one-man performances ever recorded. Like most great gangsta rappers, Nas presents himself as conflicted on thug life, intrigued by the fame and power, seduced by the money and women, but also plagued by the guilt, fear of death, and destruction of innocence suggested by the chilling album cover. Nor are these conflicts limited to the consequences of gang life. After all, how many rappers so (justifiably) cocky about their creative and technical mastery of their art would lend perhaps their greatest song a refrain of “the world is yours”? Nas manipulates these contradictions to make Illmatic a fascinating series of technical and lyrical contrasts, alternating his flow and following passages built around dizzying syntax with others whose direct emotional approach relies on the pull-no-punches spirit of the blues: Life’s a bitch and then you die/That’s why we get high, cos you never know when you’re gonna go. Despite arriving in what was still the relative infancy of the rap album as an entity unto itself, Illmatic set a standard that may never be equaled – a work even more impressive on its own terms than the East Coast renaissance that launched in its wake.