Revisiting Nas’ Revered Debut Album 'illmatic' 28 Years Later
Exploring the Queensbridge poet’s seminal debut record.
Nas’ illmatic is hailed perennially as one of the greatest hip hop albums ever—which is more impressive when you consider it was Nas’ debut record. To celebrate illmatic's 28th birthday, we’re taking a deep dive into the compact disc that revolutionised the contemporary music landscape.
A 20-year-old Nasir Jones—originally going under the rap moniker Kid Wave, then Nasty Nas before simplifying things to just Nas—released his debut album, illmatic, 28 years ago [April 19th] today.
1994 wasn’t our first introduction to Nas: we first heard the Queensbridge spitter on wax three years earlier on Main Source’s 1991 offering, Breaking Atoms. Produced and emceed by the Large Professor, the track on which 17-year-old Nas featured (“Live At The Barbeque") saw him turn heads with:
“Verbal assassin, my architect pleases / When I was twelve, I went to hell for snuffin’ Jesus / Nasty Nas is a rebel to America / Police murderer, I’m causin’ hysteria.”
The following year, 3rd Bass member and early MF DOOM adopter MC Serch featured Nas on the cut "Back to the Grill" from his solo debut, Return Of The Product.
Serch took Nas under his wing and brought a hastily recorded demo to his label, Def Jam, and its then-president Russell Simmons. While Simmons passed on signing Nas, Serch quickly secured Nas a deal with Columbia Records. Serch curated the soundtrack for the romantic thriller flick Zebrahead, on which he put Nas’ first single: "Halftime", in late 1992.
With the leverage of having MC Serch in his corner and noise from his aforementioned guest verses, Nas was able to attract the interest of numerous high-profile producers. The Queensbridge representative glued together the pieces for a debut album from summer ‘92 to early ‘93.
From DJ Premier, Large Professor, Q-Tip and Pete Rock, hailing from Gang Starr, Main Source, A Tribe Called Quest and Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth—the album was an all-star cast that many emcees envied.
What earned the album a coveted rating of five mics from cult hip-hop magazine The Source, though, was Nas’ innovation with rhyming patterns. When you listen to hip hop pre-Nas, there really isn’t that kind of a style and delivery exhibited on tracks such as “Halftime”, “It Ain’t Hard To Tell”, or “NY State Of Mind”: with the latter’s first verse recorded in one take. On the track, Nas spits, “I don’t know how to start this shit, yo," before reading aloud pure fire from a piece of paper he’d just finished scribbling the bars on.
Nas’ intricate rhyme schemes were years beyond many of his East Coast peers at the time. The year before illmatic’s release, the rap catalogues were filled with releases by KRS One, Run-D.M.C, and The Ultramagnetic MCs, who were all still in their prime at this point in the rap chronology. Big Daddy Kane, Heavy D & The Boyz, and LL Cool J had dominated the late-80s-to-early-90s rap era, and all had new music out or on the way, alongside promising debut CDs from the Lords Of The Underground and The Roots.
The way Nas raised the bar for rap flows and internal rhymes with 1994’s illmatic was akin to Rakim’s flows on his 1987 Eric B. album Paid In Full. With either one of these artists, East Coast hip hop is distinctly different before and after each of their game-changing debuts.
While illmatic is known today as one of the greatest hip hop albums of all time—with some arguing it’s Nas’ only great album—when it drooped back in ‘94, it was a commercial flop.
Despite being critically acclaimed, earning five mics from The Source and garnering four stars from the Rolling Stone, Nas’ illmatic clocked just 59,000 sales in its first week. At the time, one needed to purchase a hard copy of an album to listen to it properly.
Relatively speaking, 59,000 units sold was considered a flop, especially when compared with his 1996 follow-up It Was Written, which saw 270,000 copies fly off the shelves throughout its first week of release.
MC Serch argues illmatic’s poor sales came as a result of supposed bootlegging: claiming to have found 70,000 pirate copies of illmatic in a garage in Queens before illmatic’s release, which featured an improvised album cover of Nas being crucified. Others have disputed the existence of a bootleg operation, however.
illmatic was largely ignored at the award shows as well, with most of the love being given to The Notorious B.I.G.’s debut which also dropped in 1994, Ready To Die.
It didn’t help that illmatic had a rushed production, either. I know that’s a hard one to fathom. It’s been said that since MC Serch’s bootleg discovery, Columbia fast-tracked the release of illmatic—abandoning its plan to make it a longer, more expansive project. It’s interesting to note that the nine-song tracklist we know and love (10 including the intro, “The Genesis”) could’ve been something very different.
Nas’ demo tape, which was also put together hastily, featured unfinished tracks such as “Life Is Like A Dice Game”—finally repackaged as a Spotify exclusive with Freddie Gibbs and Cordae last year—and the static-laden “I’m A Villain”, which found its home on the 2014 20th anniversary reissue, illmatic XX.
The “demo” tape can be found online at sites such as YouTube, but - although most of the tracks are distinctly pre-illmatic, such as “Just Another Day In The Projects”, and there are some, such as the AZ and Biz Markie-assisted “Understanding”, are which are confirmed to have been recorded post-illmatic and pre-It Was Written.
In any case, it ain’t hard to tell that since 1994, the album has been cemented as a hip hop classic. Listening in 2022, the LP has aged like a vintage merlot, with new quirks and layers unpacked by rap fanatics and music lovers to this very day. illmatic is a true staple of the culture. Undeniably genre-defining, densely packed and uncompromisingly grit-laden, illmatic is a time capsule we consider a masterpiece.
Stream illmatic below: