№ 23 of 100
Illmatic
Illmatic by Nas (1994), № 23 in The Lead-In’s 100 greatest albums. Nas is nineteen. He never makes a record this good again. Nobody does.
Nas was twenty. He had been writing rhymes since he was nine. He hired five of New York's most respected hip-hop producers, DJ Premier, Pete Rock, Q-Tip, Large Professor, L.E.S., and made a 39-minute album in fragments across eighteen months. No filler. Ten tracks. One guest verse. The album that defined East Coast hip-hop's most ambitious phase.
- Released
- April 19, 1994
- Label
- Columbia Records (Sony Music)
- Producer(s)
- DJ Premier · Pete Rock · Q-Tip · Large Professor · L.E.S.
- Runtime
- 39:39 (10 tracks)
- Chart peak (US)
- #12 (Billboard 200) · #2 (Top R&B/Hip-Hop)
- Chart peak (UK)
- #80 (UK Albums Chart, eventual)
- Certifications
- 2× Platinum (RIAA, 2014); estimated 2M+ units globally, the album's commercial trajectory was slow, its critical canonization immediate
- Awards & honours
- Library of Congress National Recording Registry (2020); ranked #44 on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums (2020); routinely #1 on East Coast hip-hop polls since 1995; The Source 5 Mic rating (the magazine's highest)
Nasir Jones grew up in Queensbridge Houses, the largest public housing project in North America. His father was a jazz musician. His mother was a postal worker. By age twelve he had written his first rhyme. By age nineteen he was being courted by Russell Simmons. By age twenty he had made a debut that would set the East Coast hip-hop canon for the next thirty years.
Nasir Jones, Nas, was born September 14, 1973, in Queens, New York, to Olu Dara, a Mississippi-born jazz musician who played cornet on a wide range of New York jazz sessions, and Fannie Ann Jones, a postal worker. Nas grew up in Queensbridge Houses, the largest public housing project in North America at approximately 3,142 apartments and 6,000 residents. He had dropped out of school after eighth grade and had been writing rhymes since he was twelve. His older brother Jungle was in a local crew; Nas had begun appearing on neighborhood freestyle tapes by age fourteen. He recorded his first verse on a Main Source single ('Live at the Barbeque') in 1991 at age seventeen, and the verse was so impressive that within months he had a record deal with Columbia.
The album took eighteen months to make. Nas had been writing songs continuously through 1992 and 1993; he worked with five different producers, each of whom contributed two or three tracks. DJ Premier produced 'N.Y. State of Mind,' 'Memory Lane (Sittin' in da Park),' and 'Represent.' Pete Rock produced 'The World Is Yours.' Q-Tip produced 'One Love.' Large Professor produced 'Halftime' and 'It Ain't Hard to Tell.' L.E.S. produced 'Life's a Bitch.' Each producer brought his own studio setup, his own sample library, and his own aesthetic. The album's distinctive sonic identity comes from the way Nas's voice and lyrical approach gave coherence to five different production styles.
The lyrics on Illmatic were the most precise hip-hop verses anyone had heard in 1994. Nas's narrative method was cinematic, short scenes, named characters, specific addresses, weather and time of day, the sense that the listener was being told a story by someone who had been physically present. 'N.Y. State of Mind' is a panoramic city-as-character portrait; 'Life's a Bitch' is a 19-year-old's meditation on mortality with AZ delivering the album's only guest verse; 'The World Is Yours' is the album's hopeful counterpoint, named after the Scarface line. 'Memory Lane (Sittin' in da Park)' is a childhood reverie scored over DJ Premier's most lyrical sample-based production; 'One Love' is an extended letter to friends in prison; 'Halftime' is a freestyle showcase; 'Represent' is a Queensbridge ode; 'It Ain't Hard to Tell' is the album's most virtuosic single-verse performance. The album has 'Genesis' as a brief intro and no other interludes, Columbia's standard hip-hop release template was deliberately rejected.
Released April 19, 1994, the album sold approximately 60,000 copies in its first week, strong for a debut but modest by Columbia's expectations. Sales rose slowly across the rest of 1994 and into 1995. The first single, 'It Ain't Hard to Tell,' produced by Large Professor and built around a Michael Jackson 'Human Nature' sample, became Nas's first crossover hit; the video reached MTV's BET-only rotation. Critical reception was unanimous: Source magazine awarded the album 5 mics, its highest rating, an honor reserved for what the magazine considered classics. The album sold 500,000 copies (Gold) by 1995 and one million (Platinum) by 1996. By 2014 RIAA certified it 2× Platinum.
Beyond the commercial trajectory, Illmatic's critical canonization was immediate and has been continuous for thirty years. The album appears at the top of every East Coast hip-hop list ever published; it routinely places at #1 in 'best rap album of all time' polls. The 2005 documentary 'Illmatic XX' and the 2014 book 'Born to Use Mics' (a series of academic essays on the album, edited by Michael Eric Dyson and Sohail Daulatzai) are both unprecedented in hip-hop scholarship, no other rap album has had similar academic attention.
Illmatic belongs at number twenty-three because it is the rare debut album that arrived fully formed as a definitive statement of its genre. The album's structural choices, five producers, no filler, one guest verse, ten tracks, 39 minutes, became the template for the next two decades of hip-hop albums. Its lyrical method (specific narrative detail, named characters, cinematic compression) became the standard for what 'lyrical' hip-hop meant. Without Illmatic there is no Jay-Z's Reasonable Doubt, no Notorious B.I.G.'s Ready to Die in the form it took, no Mobb Deep's The Infamous, no Kendrick Lamar's Section.80 or good kid m.A.A.d city. The road from late-1980s sampling-era hip-hop to the album-as-statement form that dominated rap from 1995 to 2020 runs directly through this record.
Pressing guide — the one to own
Original 1994 US pressing, Columbia C 57684, a single LP in a single sleeve with a printed inner/insert (the gatefold is a later reissue feature). The front is the sepia photograph of a seven-year-old Nas superimposed over the Queensbridge projects. The deadwax was cut at Masterdisk by Tony Dawsey, with runouts in the form 'AL-57684-1A ... MASTERDISK' and 'BL-57684-1A'. Original vinyl is genuinely scarce and desirable, with a Discogs median around £190 and sealed copies typically £400 or so, well below the figure sometimes quoted.
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