The phrases and images are so deeply rooted in rap consciousness to have become cliché. In the next sentence, he remembers dark streets and the noose. Sometimes his pen taps the paper and his brain blanks. The only light is the orange glow of a blunt, bodega liquor, and the adolescent rush of first creation. The enduring vision of Nas: a baby-faced Buddha monk in public housing, scribbling lotto dreams and grim reaper nightmares in dollar notebooks, words enjambed in the margins. I never sleep, cause sleep is the cousin of death. The evidence they point to when they want to say: this is how good it can be. Illmatic is the gold standard that boom-bap connoisseurs refer to in the same way that Baby Boomers talk about Highway 61 Revisited. It has no 'Regulate' that can inspire drunken Nate Dogg sing-a-longs, but it is widely regarded as the greatest East Coast rap album ever made. Illmatic only sold 330,000 copies in its first year. He signed Warren G instead, who went triple platinum in the summer and fall of 1994. He has crossed over enough without ever making radio hits, save for 'Oochie Wally', in which he is out-rapped by his bodyguard- all for oochie.īut Def Jam's Russell Simmons passed on the demo, famously claiming that Nas sounded too much like Queensbridge machine gun, Kool G Rap. Nas is firmly entrenched in VH1 Special territory. There was the album with Damian Marley, the feud with Jay-Z, there was Belly. Twenty years deep, he's nominated for a Grammy and is in Gap ads with his dad. The kid who went to hell for snuffing Jesus has become a sacred cow. When people start making greatest rapper lists you can't count to five before Nas' name is mentioned. Even a young RZA and GZA got bamboozled into goofy New Jack Swing jams by clueless executives. LL Cool J was mugging with a red beret in Toys. Big Daddy Kane was firmly in the silken post-Madonna Sex book era. It was after Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer, and leather-suited rappers wanted that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Secret of the Ooze money. Rap-A-Lot was carving up its empire in the South. Death Row and West Coast gangsta rap dominated the charts and mass media oxygen. New York street culture was losing its birthright to hip-hop's evolution. The Columbia press sheet that accompanies it opens: 'While it's sad that there's so much frontin' in the rap world today, this should only make us sit up and pay attention when a rapper comes along who's not about milking the latest trend and running off with the loot.' Hip-hop was a teenager when Illmatic dropped*.* Old enough for biblical foundation, but young enough to be embroiled in an early identity crisis. I lay puzzled as I backtrack to earlier times. He was the spawn of the Wild Style, the first great to grow up with Park Jams as his earliest memories. He's carrying on tradition, defined as: 'When it's real, you do it even without a recording contract.' It's an oath of purity amidst poisons- something that seems sanctimonious in a post-Puffy world, but it assured the older gods that they would have a stake in the next generation. His brother Jungle snaps, 'yo, Nas, what the fuck is this bullshit?' Nas tells him to chill.

Nas calls his version 'The Genesis', fusing his own story of origin with the culture. The track shifts to ' The Subway Theme' from Wild Style, hip-hop's first creation myth, the 1983 film that exposed the routines of the South Bronx to the rest of the world. A VHS snippet from Wild Style immediately snarls, 'Stop fucking around and be a man!' You hear a cassette tape hissing the verse from teenaged Nasty Nas on Main Source's ' Live at the BBQ,' 1991: ' When I was 12, I went to Hell for snuffing Jesus.' He anointed himself the 'street's disciple.' Everyone blessed him as the Golden Child. Illmatic starts with that rumbling of the train. It's just the attitude out there, it's just life. Everybody's mentality revolves around the projects. He explained the mentality to The Source in April 1994, the same month Illmatic was instantly canonized with a perfect 5-Mic score: 'When I was a kid I just stayed in the projects… that shit is like a city. The neighbors are the rotting East River and the 'Big Alice' power plant, its smokestacks hacking up black clouds. The pissy elevators only stop on every other floor. Queensbridge Houses, the largest projects in America, brick buildings dun as dead leaves, a six-block maze clotted with 7,000-plus trying to survive. The doors crumple open and the passengers vanish up half-lit stairwells into the Bridge.

Kool g rap wanted dead or alive