Nas's Illmatic Read Online Free

E!” these days, Nas was one of the first emcees to depict the dark side of the black American experience without resorting to didacticism. He created a work of art and a snapshot of history which did not empower righteousness or further street legend. Life was hard, “simple and plain.” There is little moral condemnation in
Illmatic
, but even less glorification. Through all of its complexities, the album is built out of the basic building blocks of life in the projects.
    Because of this realism, Nas was no longer a rapper on
Illmatic
, He was playing a role, even if it was himself. By constructing this persona, Nas not only laid out his own career for the next decade-plus, but the careers of dozens of other rappers that were able to use their considerable skills to develop similar personas—perhaps most notably the laid-back gangsta persona of Jay-Z. (It’s no wonder that Nas has constructed an aura of mystique around him that has made access to him difficult and knowledge about his day-to-day life so hard to come by; he has a reputation to uphold. Like Bob Dylan, he wants to let the work speak for itself.) The combination ofthis matter-of-fact delivery and quiet confidence has permeated every level of hip hop. His brazen ambition has become a road map for every rapper that hopes to reach an artistic peak. It seems right that Nas would make
Illmatic
at the age when maturity begins to turn boys into men. This was, in many regards, the first album of the rest of hip hop’s life.
“Illmatic’s
effect on hip hop was the same as how everybody switched from gold to platinum,” rapper AZ says of the record’s impact on New York streets in the mid-90s. “It was historic.”
    So how can an album be both an end and a beginning? Though it might be difficult for a newcomer to understand the powerful respect for tradition behind
Illmatic
considering the until-then-unheard-of title, the most basic of listens can take away the essential touchstones of hip hop from the album. Nas speaks of finding work, producing art, building and keeping friendships. He also speaks of smoking weed, shooting guns, and having sex. The beats, though remarkably consistent and unforgiving for their time, are nevertheless technically conventional loops, made by instantly recognizable names who have, particularly in the case of DJ Premier, instantly recognizable sounds.
    Yet beneath this fundamental listen is life itself. Here is a young black man growing up in the inner-city, struggling between the naiveté of his age and the unflinching reality of his experience; fighting for his life amidst death and destruction; representing strength in the face of overwhelming structural power; dreaming of wealth in daily poverty; believing in an ultimate answer when only emptiness greets him. These are concepts that are often expressed with common signifiers, signifiers that frequently seem to contradict one another . But it is these concepts which fan out over forty minutes in such a way that Nas’s life (whether it be Nas the rapper or Nas the character) can be seen in its full spectrum.
    By assuming, then, that
Illmatic
can be more than just ten songs that represent the culmination of hip hop’s adolescence, the listener has opened up to the possibility that a work of art, like a person, need not be just one thing. Nas’s debut challenges that notion as well as anything; fittingly, it achieves this feat as simply as possible, by offering nothing more than an honest account of a New York life that began on a late summer day in Brooklyn.

Chapter Two
Youth/Experience
    “My soul’s been rapping since the first man walked in Africa,” Nas told
Rolling Stone
in May of ’94, right after
Illmatic
dropped. “At night, my spirit still goes hunting down there.” That may well turn out to be true, but the body he inhabited at the time was much younger. Born in Crown Heights, Brooklyn to Charles Jones III (aka Olu Dara) and Ann Jones, Nasir bin Olu Dara Jones