Illmatic by Nas (1994) — what a copy is worth and which pressing to own, in a full Lead-In dossier: Nas's debut: 10 tracks, 39 minutes, five producers and one housing project in Queens. Columbia rushed it out against the bootleggers, and it's still one of the best rap albums ever made.
Nas's 1994 debut: 10 tracks and 39 minutes from five producers and a 20-year-old raised in Queensbridge. A near-perfect record whose writing hasn't dated, though its sound was overtaken almost at once.
Columbia rushed Illmatic out because bootleg tapes were circulating, and its famous economy is partly that accident. It's still one of the best rap albums ever made. The writing carries it. The narrow world it chooses is its one real limit.
The piano loop on 'The World Is Yours' isn't credited on Illmatic. Pete Rock made the beat around 1993, in his basement studio in Mount Vernon, from Ahmad Jamal's 1970 recording 'I Love Music'. Pete Rock told The Source in 2014 that when Nas first heard it, he froze and closed his eyes. The 1994 inner sleeve lists the samples that were cleared. For that track it names only T La Rock's 'It's Yours'. In January 2022 Pete Rock's team said he may still be owed royalties on the song. It's a small gap in the paperwork, and a clue to how the album reached the shops: in a hurry, before anyone had tidied up.
The usual story treats Illmatic as a flawless object. It has 10 tracks, runs under 40 minutes and seems to waste nothing. Nas encouraged that reading. 'I was trying to make a flawless album,' he says in Time Is Illmatic, the 2014 documentary about the record. But the shape everyone admires owes as much to bootleggers as to a plan. Tapes were circulating, and Columbia rushed out a short, 10-song album, dropping earlier plans for it. None of that makes the praise wrong. Illmatic is one of the best rap albums ever made, and the writing is the reason. The haste suited it. It also fixed its limits in place: a single neighbourhood, and a single kind of beat.
The record is about a place, and it says so on the vinyl. Nas was born in Brooklyn on 14 September 1973 and grew up in the Queensbridge Houses in Long Island City, Queens. Opened in 1939, Queensbridge is the largest public housing development in North America, with 96 buildings and nearly 7,000 residents. The label calls side one '40 Side North' and side two '41st Side South', after the avenues of its North and South Houses. His father, Olu Dara, was a jazz musician from Natchez, Mississippi. In July 1991, aged 17, Nas rapped a verse on Main Source's 'Live at the Barbeque'. In May 1992 his best friend and DJ, Willy 'Ill Will' Graham, was shot dead in Queensbridge. The inner sleeve lists Ill Will Music as a publisher on every song after the intro.
Getting signed took a run of refusals. Exclaim! reported in 2004 that Cold Chillin' had turned down his demo. MC Serch of 3rd Bass signed him to Serchlite Publishing and shopped the demo himself. Serch told XXL that Russell Simmons, at Def Jam, said Nas sounded like Kool G Rap and passed. Serch says he went to Faith Newman at Columbia the same day, and she signed Nas. The sleeve credits her and Serch as executive producers. Work began in 1992. Nas was 18 to 20 while the album was made, and 20 when it came out on 19 April 1994. Nothing on it sounds young. The voice is calm and exact.
Five producers made the beats, and the label shows how spread out their work was. DJ Premier's three tracks were recorded at D&D. Large Professor's three went through Chung King, and Pete Rock's and Q-Tip's were done at Battery. 'Life's a Bitch' was recorded at Unique and Chung King. Large Professor told XXL that Q-Tip kept his equipment in Phife's grandmother's basement. Nas co-produced one track and conceived 'The Genesis' with Newman. On paper it should sound like a compilation. It doesn't, because the beats share a source and the songs share a narrator. Jeff Weiss wrote in Pitchfork in 2013 that the loops came from their parents' record collections, from Donald Byrd to Michael Jackson. Robert Christgau put it more simply. The producers turned samples into looped grooves, he wrote, and Nas turned plain lines into hooks.
'N.Y. State of Mind' is where the method works at full strength. Nas told XXL he had most of the first verse written before the session. Premier remembers him unsure where to come in, then cutting the whole verse in one take. The loop is Joe Chambers's 'Mind Rain', a piano figure that hardly changes. With so little moving underneath, everything rests on the voice, and the voice never loses its place. Nas finishes at about 4:25, and the loop plays on alone to the end, as if the city carries on without him. It's the best track on the album. A whole verse held together in one pass makes the case for Nas as a performer as well as a writer.
'Life's a Bitch' is the album's only guest spot, and the session accounts make it sound almost accidental. L.E.S., who produced it with Nas, told XXL that Nas asked AZ if he had anything, and AZ went straight into the booth. Nas said he'd lost his rhyme books on the train that day. The beat is built on the Gap Band's 'Yearning for Your Love'. After the last vocal line, at about 2:40, Nas's father plays the track out on trumpet. Olu Dara says his son asked him to play a little at the end. He and AZ are the only guests the sleeve credits. A track built on a loop from an old record ends on a live horn, played by the rapper's own father. It's the warmest moment on the album.
'The World Is Yours' is where the album lets some light in. The title line comes from Scarface, as Rolling Stone noted in 2022. Nas says in Time Is Illmatic that the song's vibe is pure Tony Montana. He also asked a reluctant Pete Rock to sing the hook, so the chorus belongs to a producer who didn't want to sing it. 'It Ain't Hard to Tell', the closer, runs on Michael Jackson's 'Human Nature' and Kool & the Gang's 'N.T.'. Serch, who shopped the demo, told XXL the song changed only a little. The first verse and most of the second were rewritten, and Large Professor's beat stayed much the same. Nas raps from the first second to 3:13 without a long break. It ends the album on technique rather than story. That's the right call, because by then the story has been told.
None of this sold quickly. Illmatic entered the Billboard 200 at #12 on the chart dated 7 May 1994. That was its peak. It sold 330,000 copies in its first year. 'It Ain't Hard to Tell' got no higher than #91 on the Hot 100, and Rolling Stone noted in 2020 that the album never crossed over. By the end of 2001, MTV News reported, it had sold 818,000 copies in the US and spent 19 weeks on the chart by then. The RIAA didn't certify it 2× Platinum until January 2019. In Britain the album has never been in the Official Albums Chart Top 100. The reputation came first, and the sales spent 25 years catching up.
The reputation was there from the first month. The Source gave it 5 mics, its top rating, in April 1994. Reginald C. Dennis, then its music editor, later told HipHopDX it was the only 5 he allowed on his watch. He broke his own rule to give it. But the praise wasn't unanimous. Heidi Siegmund gave it 2 stars out of 4 in the Los Angeles Times on 22 May 1994. She picked out 'The World Is Yours' as one of the year's best songs. Too much of the rest, she thought, was stale attitude and posturing. Robert Christgau came round to an A− but still preferred The Notorious B.I.G.'s Ready to Die. In 2014 Billboard argued that the boom-bap sound Illmatic defined was soon swept aside by G-funk, Bad Boy and the South.
Those critics have a point, though not quite the one they meant. The weakness of Illmatic isn't attitude. It's range. Weiss gave it 10 out of 10, while granting that other albums have higher highs. He found its power in the narrow scope of its worldview. That narrowness is also its limit, in sound as well as subject. Every track is built on loops from older records, and its newness was in the writing, not the beats. 'Halftime' was the first of these songs to be released. It was on Billboard's rap chart in February 1993, credited to Nasty Nas. It plays like a display of rhyming rather than a song. 'One Time 4 Your Mind' is pleasant and slight. The album perfected a way of making rap records just as the market was about to move on.
Its influence is easier to document than its novelty. Weiss reads Ready to Die, released 5 months later, as borrowing Illmatic's art ideas and album structure. The borrowing was so blatant, he writes, that Ghostface and Raekwon gave a whole skit to mocking it. He also hears Jay-Z building a song on Reasonable Doubt around a Nas line. Common has said that hearing an early copy pushed him to rework his near-finished Resurrection. The institutions followed. Pitchfork gave it 10 out of 10 in 2013, and Rolling Stone ranked it #44 among the greatest albums in 2020. In March 2021 the Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry.
Illmatic is one of the best rap albums ever made, and it earns that line by line. The writing is its strongest suit, and the performance is close behind. For much of the sessions Nas was still in his teens, and he sounds far older. The brevity was forced by the bootleg trade, and it happens to suit a record this focused. Its limits are real. Two tracks are slighter than the rest, and its sound was overtaken almost as soon as it arrived. Its influence is well documented, and the writing hasn't dated. Play 'N.Y. State of Mind' and 'Life's a Bitch' back to back, and the reputation stops sounding like hype.
The one to own is the 1994 US LP, Columbia C 57684, in a single sleeve with a printed inner sleeve. Tony Dawsey cut the lacquers at Masterdisk. The runouts read AL-57684-1A 2-1 MASTERDISK TD on side one and BL-57684-1A 1-1 on side two. In Europe the first pressing, Columbia 475959 1, was made at Sony/CBS Haarlem. It carries 01-475959-20 on the back; the later Nice Price issue carries 02-475959-20.
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