Review Summary: A moody masterpiece that paints a terrifyingly realistic portrayal of gang violence in urban New York
If you could go back in time and tell me a year ago I’d be listening to Nas, I’d probably laugh at you. Everything people hate about rap is here: songs about gang violence, drugs and guns. But to catagorise Nas as simply ‘gangsta rap’ would be missing the point somewhat.
Illmatic is far more deep than that. Nas never glorifies these topics, but instead documents his life growing up with violence unavoidably around him in the tough Queensbridge project of New York, giving a realistic portrayal.
The atmosphere is incredible throughout the album, mainly due to the fantastic production which hip-hop legends Pete Rock, Q-Tip, DJ Premier and others worked on. The sound is low-key, dark and grimy, giving it a very realistic and edgy sound. It is really the production that
Illmatic owes it’s success to. The hypnotic atmosphere puts most black metal to shame.
There are catchy hooks and melodies, but they never stand out too much, so the album is able to retain it’s moody sound without sounding to ‘poppy’, even on the more melodic tracks like ‘One Love’. ‘Illmatic’ sounds remarkably believable, which makes it engrossing right from the beginning. It creates such a vivid picture you can almost believe you are there yourself.
Even the first track, an introduction to the harsh world Nas is trying to portray with little more than background music, talking and the sound of a train is immediately gripping and drags you straight in.
The album really starts with the second track ‘N.Y. State of Mind’ though. While rap is usually criticised for being too ‘simple’, here Nas shows how to make minimalism work
well. With little more than an ominous simple piano loop and lyrics like ‘I never sleep, ‘cause sleep is the cousin of death’, Nas creates a tense atmosphere that could never be replicated by nearly any complex progressive rock epic.
The album is similar to this the rest of the way through; dark and gritty. The simplicity of the songs never gets monotonous or at all irritating, as they’re all easily short enough to finish before they could drag on at all. It’s almost an album you can relax to, but even with the mellow soul and jazz samples (and a cornet solo, played by Nas’s own father on ‘Life’s a Bitch’) it always remains tense and paranoid sounding, as if danger is always close by.
Even the more upbeat parts like the song ‘The World is Yours’ have a certain bleakness to them. In the song the lyrics which mix an optimistic chant of ‘the world is yours’ with the album’s more typical much more bitter lyrics. Sometimes hope does show through in the album though, and at times Nas gives a more positive outlook on life in impoverished New York and focuses on the good times and hope for the future as well as the violence that plagues the area.
Nas’s rapping and lyrics are consistently fantastic throughout. He is easily one of hip-hop’s best lyricists and his raps are both complex and flow perfectly. Once you look past the urban slang, it is clear that the lyrics are of an amazingly high quality. Nas was able to combine deep introspective lyrics with the more violent themes of the album, with his own unique and highly effective style. Many of the songs are highly detailed and engaging first-person narratives which incorporate original and influential rhyme schemes. While intricate and powerful, the lyrics never lose their power.
One criticism of the lyrics is the overuse of profanity, especially the constant use of the ‘n’ word. However, this can be justified as being part of the culture that Nas is from and that he is depicting in the album. Apart from this, the only real problem with the album is the length of it. At just under 40 minutes it seems far to short and easily could have done with a few extra songs. Luckily, the songs are so addictive it is easy to listen to them time after time, so it’s easy to repeat the album as soon as it’s finished anyway.
