Hip-hop abounds with birthday references. Most involve partying, birthday suits, and, though food in rap is its own great subject, cake. Others are about hard times—Biggie Smalls’s recollection that in childhood, “birthdays was the worst days,” or Outkast’s Big Boi on not being invited to the birthdays of his own child. Then there’s “Life’s a Bitch,” a whole birthday verse from Nas. Like a lot of “Illmatic,” the album on which it appears, the song is discreetly ambiguous. The chorus is, “Life’s a bitch and then you die, that’s why we get high / ’cause you never know when you’re gonna go.” Not the rosiest of birthday sentiments, but the song’s other elements—the mellow production; the verses of Nas and AZ, the guest emcee; and Olu Dara’s horn, at the end—all conspire to give it a twist. Quietly, the cynicism fizzes with hope. Nas had made it to … twenty. “Life’s a bitch,” the track says. “And yet, look, I’m here.”
“Illmatic” came out in 1994. The album was critically hailed, but sales were modest (it only went platinum years later), and it at first seemed destined to remain the preserve of cerebral fans and rappers’ rappers. Today, it’s everyone’s favorite. In honor of the twentieth anniversary, a new reissue is out, and Nas has been making the rounds performing “Illmatic” in concert, including two shows at the Kennedy Center with the National Symphony Orchestra. “Time is Illmatic,” a low-key and interesting documentary about the record’s conception, opened the Tribeca Film Festival. Now with eleven albums, Nas has a fellowship in his name at Harvard; his voice stars—awfully, perfectly—in commercials for Hennessy. He’s both bound to and a world away from his past in Long Island City’s Queensbridge Houses.
Rap fans will be quick to point out that “Illmatic” wasn’t the only memorable record from 1994, which also saw works by Pete Rock & C. L. Smooth, Outkast, Gang Starr, The Notorious B.I.G., and others. The Wu-Tang Clan débuted the year before, Jay Z two years after—how many birthday hugs do we need to give? Yet, with all respect to the field, “Illmatic” is a special case. The album introduced a striking voice—a diamond ground in the pestle of a filthy ashtray—with a remarkably assured delivery, the lyrics managing to sound at once channelled and rhythmically free. It united some of the best producers, cohesively, without opting for easy hits. And by serving one small, pressurized landscape as a whole, as if seen from every angle, “Illmatic” bottled a time.
The anniversary buzz is funny, though: it reminds you that the album was a salute to the music that came before it. Nas signalled this in the intro, with a snippet from the 1983 graffiti film “Wild Style,” and an argument over an old-school song on the radio. After repeated listens, it’s clear how ingrained the theme of tribute is throughout: the talk of park jams, the samples of past emcees, the bit in “Represent” that begins, “Before the BDP conflict with MC Shan / around the time that Shanté dissed the Real Roxanne,” as though time unfolds according to a New York hip-hop calendar. But, wait—wasn’t this some gangster-reportage rap, all crack vials and artillery? It was, and it was partly that content that made the eighties love unobvious. The beats were of their moment, while Nas’s rhymes, even as they drew from un-shouting veterans like Kool G. Rap and Rakim, meant a whole new level of writtenness for the genre.
The album’s cover has a seven-year-old Nasir Jones, a preternaturally adult glare on his face, transposed over the Queensbridge projects. In the music, Nas darts around in memory. He might be dwelling on the mayhem of crack (“I lay puzzled as I backtrack to earlier times”), flexing gangster bona fides (“I used to watch ‘Chips,’ / now I load Glock clips”), or just touching on childhood days in freestyle. The reflection rounds out an otherwise elusive persona, one that sounds young and old, and so equally involved and detached that it can be confusing. The voice of “Illmatic” boasts a crew yet seems solitary, celebrates the projects and draws them as a prison, talks hard while lamenting crime’s havoc and saying that the streets have him “stressed something terrible.” Improbably, this voice feels like a flood of real life.
Only part of what compels in hip-hop reveals itself with a literary comb, of course, and it’s good to listen to Jon Caramanica, the Times critic, when he notes that “ ‘Illmatic’ became something of a blank slate.… It became what the listener wanted it to be as much as, if not more than, what Nas intended it to be.” But that doesn’t mean that the album’s strengths are all subjective. For one, there’s the gift with phrase. Take “Memory Lane,” in which Nas says that he rhymes “for listeners, blunt-heads, fly ladies, and prisoners.” The first and last words are conspicuously formal, and by being sandwiched between them the slang ones flash their strange originality. Elsewhere in the song, Nas says that a friend was, quite simply, “shot for a sheep coat.” In a few quick and understated words, the absurdity of the incident is pressed home.
“Illmatic” is also praised for storytelling, which is a way of saying that it contains “One Love.” In that song, over a sublime Heath Brothers kalimba loop by way of Q-Tip, Nas composes letters to friends in jail, and then tells of returning from time away to find a twelve-year-old selling drugs on the project benches. The boy is in a jam and wants advice; he’s already in deep, so Nas gives him a chillingly practical kind. Especially fascinating is how the elder views this “little bastard”: he is dismayed that the kid admires him. Other tales are brief and go nowhere in particular, and yet they engage through their momentum and vivid touches. In “New York State of Mind”—a phrase that now evokes the nineties crime warren of Nas and DJ Premier as much as the nostalgia of Billy Joel—a shoot-out ends with escape into a building lobby. The latter is “filled with children, probably couldn’t see as high as I be.” Are the kids a further threat or just some random background pathos? The lines that follow could support either view, but either way the image is hard to get out of your mind.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, after such a venerated début, Nas’s work has gone in all sorts of directions. He’s adopted and shed a kingpin alter ego, rhymed some iffy sentiments over iffy beats, dueled with Jay Z, and courted controversy. But it only takes one song, like “Get Down” or “Made You Look,” for fans to be reminded of the arresting singularity of his best stuff. “Life Is Good,” his most recent album, grapples spiritedly with the present: there’s a warm-hearted divorce track, plus one that reveals what it’s like trying to raise a teen-age daughter who knows all about her father’s life and music. Though the coming-of-age world of “Illmatic” was heavier, in a way, it was also simpler—qualities that may contribute to the record’s appeal. When Nas performed it live after the film-festival screening of “Time Is Illmatic,” he wore the clothes of his earlier self. It made for a curious picture, a sort of negative of the classic’s cover: a portrait of the rapper long grown, now free to visit youth.
