Illmatic - Nas (1994)

ideated from: 1994 being the best year in music history

I’m cheating on this one in the interest of giving equal time to 1994 hip hop. I didn’t really get on this when it came out. Because I was a midwestern white guy, and I was more rock-focused in 1994, a lot of the hip hop I listened to was a couple of years old (The Chronic, Ice Cube, disposable heroes, cypress hill, us3) or just whatever was on MTV, which Nas wasn’t really.

There’s enough ink spilled about the rise of gangsta rap and the east coast vs west coast split in hip hop culture; I’m not going to try to add to it. But this album–as much as any other from this period–plotted out the future of what rap would sound like for years. You could put together an immaculately classy playlist just composed of the records sampled here (in fact, you don’t have to look far).

Everything from the samples to the song structures to the attitude to the lyrical topics pointed the way forward in rap. A small dose of the old 90s-rap-standard casual homophobia aside, this is rightly considered a classic.

Tracks I liked

NY State Of Mind - DJ Premier creates a fantastically dense and claustrophobic piledriver of a track that Nas knocks out of the park.

One Love - Q-Tip produces and features, and bridges the gap between the more laid-back Native Tongues style and Nas’ hardcore outlook

One Time 4 Your Mind - a Large Professor production, a little more old-school