“Time is Illmatic”: A Critical Retrospective on Nas’s Groundbreaking Debut

There are indisputable watershed years in hip-hop history. 1979, of course, is the year Fatback Band and The Sugarhill Gang released rap’s first singles. In 1984, Rick Rubin and Russell Simmons found Def Jam in an NYU dorm; the label would define the sound of hip-hop throughout the 1980s. In 1986, Run DMC signed a million-dollar endorsement deal with Adidas, an early instance of the relationship between hip-hop, fashion, and branding. Yo! MTV Raps debuted in 1988, prompting a more sophisticated approach to the video format; meanwhile, at Harvard, juniors David Mays and Jon Shecter “pooled two hundred dollars to put together a one-page hip-hop music tipsheet which they grandly named The Source” (Chang 410). By the 1990s, that small zine would become the “the bible of hip-hop music, culture, & politics.”¹
 
1994 is another watershed year–arguably the most important of all. By then, the gangsta rap genre had started to exhaust itself, inadvertently descending into cliché-ridden self-parody. (Tamra Davis’s 1993 film CB4, starring Chris Rock, captures this decline perfectly.) The dominance of the West Coast’s musical aesthetic, known as “G-Funk,” began to dim in the smoky afterglow of Dr. Dre’s The Chronic. In February and May of that year, the Subcommittee on Commerce, Consumer Protection, and Competitiveness held two congressional hearings on “Music, Lyrics, and Commerce,” focusing on gangsta rap’s violent imagery, misogyny, and homophobia.² That year, Wesleyan University Press published the first academic monograph on rap and hip-hop, Tricia Rose’s canonical Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America.
 
Many fans view 1994 as the last gasp of creative breath before media-conglomerates put hip-hop aesthetics on life support. In part, this view is nothing more than hip-hop pastoralism; but 1994 was, in fact, an especially fecund moment in terms of musical production, with the release of several landmark albums: The Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready to Die, Common’s Resurrection, Outkast’s Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, Scarface’s The Diary, Organized Konfusion’s Stress: Extinction Agenda, Method Man’s Tical, The Roots’s From the Ground Up EP, and Wu-Tang Clan’s Enter the Wu-Tang.³ But no album from that year has received as much attention, then or now, as Nas’s Illmatic. It transformed the twenty-one-year-old MC from Queensbridge, New York–who once famously declared that he “went to hell for snuffin’ Jesus” (Main Source, “Live at the Barbeque”)–into a savior figure.⁴ Today, the aura that surrounds both him and the album persists.
 
Born to Use Mics: Reading Nas’s Illmatic, edited by Michael Eric Dyson and Sohail Daulatzai, is a collection of scholarly essays and historical documents. Given the high volume of books published every year on hip-hop music and culture, it’s surprising that Born to Use Mics is the first book of its kind, one dedicated to a single epoch-defining record. In his introduction, Daulatzai explains that the book’s primary aim is to demonstrate why and how Illmatic is still “relevant” fifteen years after its release (3)–that is, relevant both to hip-hop’s past and future as well as to race relations in America. There are other similarly worthy albums, explains Daulatzai, such as Boogie Down Production’s Criminal Minded and Ice Cube’s Amerikkka’s Most Wanted (3). But he writes that there’s “something” ineffable about Illmatic that makes it different (3).
 
The table of contents is divided into two “sides,” “40^th Side North” and “41^st Side South.” (The street names refer to the location of the Queensbridge House Projects.) The paratextual conceit reproduces the A-side/ B-side format of the album’s 12-inch pressing. Each contributor is assigned a single track to analyze. Some essayists use the assigned recordings as a jumping-off point for extended riffs on race, power, gender, and politics. Others insist on more localized readings–for example, Adilifu Nama’s “It Was Signified: ‘The Genesis'” posits that samples from the early hip-hop film Wildstyle (1983) provide the interpretive key to the album. The contributors cast Nas in a variety of roles: he’s a “black public intellectual” (97), a “lyrical ethnograph[er]” (181), a metaphysician (40, 251), and a “poet” (196).
 
Born to Use Mics concludes with a wonderfully edited section titled “Remixes.” It includes interviews, reviews, and personal reminiscences that historicize the album. (It’s comparable to the “Contexts” section one finds in Norton Critical Editions.) For example, “Remixes” reprints the infamous “5 Mic” review from The Source magazine, which is notoriously difficult to come by. Ultimately, the “Remixes” section situates Illmatic in what Pierre Bourdieu calls “the mood of the age” (Bourdieu 32), while also introducing a decidedly less academic tone into the overall discussion.
 
The strongest essays in the collection make a concerted effort to attend to the album’s historical and formal particulars. Marc Lamont Hill’s “Critical Pedagogy at Halftime” argues that Nas’s “Halftime,” the first song recorded for the album, signifies the MC’s “first full-fledged foray into the world of black public intellectuals . . . Nas performs the most critical function of the public intellectual: linking a rigorous engagement with the life of the mind to an equally rigorous engagement with the public and its problems” (98). As a black public intellectual, Nas relocates “previously overlooked stories from the margins to the center of public consciousness,” and thus has as much in common with thinkers like Michael Eric Dyson, Marc Anthony Neal, and Cornel West as he does with rappers like Kool G. Rap, Mobb Deep, and Foxy Brown (108). In addition, Nas’s dialectical performance as a black public intellectual allows him to bind “two allegedly irreconcilable camps within the hip-hop community” (98): the conscious and commercial, or underground and popular. The former is associated with original hip-hop values and formal innovation; the latter is associated with cultural industry imperatives and aesthetic compromise. Nas traverses these market-driven designations and throws into relief the values symbolically attached to each. In other words, for Hill, one lesson to be gleaned from Illmatic is that we must rethink the “division of labor” in rap (98), a division that has stunted the music’s progress.
 
Ironically enough, Hill’s essay is also important because it’s one of the few to uphold the black public intellectual tradition insofar as it dares to introduce a dissenting opinion about Nas into the book. Hill offers two critiques: first, that Nas paints “romantic, or at least uncritical, portraits of Africa,” which suggest a lack of knowledge about the continent (111); second, that Nas reproduces the “male-centered political agendas” that have historically dominated hip-hop discourse (112).
 
Michael Eric Dyson’s “‘One Love,’ Two Brothers, Three Verses” considers how Nas’s “One Love” flips hip-hop’s carceral canon on its head. Rather than rapping about time in prison, Nas instead pens three missives to incarcerated friends, “offering them not a way out but at least a view outside the prison walls that confine them” (133), a view that includes “shifting allegiances, shattered affections, and sustaining alliances” (135). As is typical of the epistolary tradition, Nas’s lyrics are infused with a colloquial ease and emotional intimacy only possible between close friends. According to Dyson, the epistle enables Nas to articulate a theme of brotherhood: “By acting as his brothers’ keeper, their eyes and ears, their scribe and conscience, Nas generates a holistic vision of black brotherhood that reflects the goodness and potential of one man reflected in the eyes of the other, despite the prevalence of negative circumstances” (138). Stylistically, Dyson’s essay pulls off a delicate but important balancing act, moving between personal narrative (“When I first heard Nas’s ‘One Love’ . . . I thought immediately of my brother Everett, who is serving a life sentence for a murder” [129]), analysis of the prison industry (“During the 1980s and 1990s, state spending for corrections grew at six times the rate of state spending on higher education” [130]), and a close reading of Nas’s lyrics, which “[marry] vernacular and formal poetic devices” (133). By moving between subjective and objective modes of analysis, the essay re-enacts the central formal dynamic at work in Nas’s “One Love.”
 
Throughout Born to Use Mics, the public housing development of Queensbridge is repeatedly alluded to in passing, but only Eddie S. Glaude Jr. maps the place and its meanings. In “‘Represent,’ Queensbridge, and the Art of Living,” Glaude Jr. reads Nas against the Queensbridge Housing Projects, “the largest low-income housing development in [New York City], with 3,142 apartments” (180). Glaude argues that the everyday violence Nas witnessed in the Queensbridge Housing Projects as a young man shaped, at least in part, a creative disposition that tends toward “lyrical ethnography.” As such, Nas’s language is a window into a place that’s ignored or willfully deserted by institutions like the New York Housing Authority.⁵ On the other hand, Glaude also emphasizes that Nas’s lyrics offer more than just faithful mimesis. Rather, Nas’s lyrics are instances of political “self-fashioning” and “making oneself present” (192). Nas depends on aesthetic approach to everyday life in order to survive, transcend, and transform Queensbridge’s horrors.
 
Not all the essays are as compelling as those by Hill, Dyson, and Glaude Jr. One persistent problem is that several contributors want to confer upon Nas the status of rap’s premier MC, the charismatic genius who stands head and shoulders above the rest. This uncritical desire is manifest in especially purple passages of praise and oddball evaluative analogies. Imani Perry writes that Nas’s “rhymes hit you like heroin, and they freeze listeners like the crystals in the nostril of the user” (“‘It Ain’t Hard to Tell’: A Story of Lyrical Transcendence,” 197); Daulatzai compares Illmatic to The Battle of Algiers and later describes Nas’s imagery as “black dadaist” (“A Rebel to America: ‘N.Y. State of Mind’ After the Towers Fell,” 57); Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr. describes the album’s music as “immaculately, eclectically, even delicately produced, and rich in layered textures and colors: a hip-hop version of Miles Davis’s signatures work, Kind of Blue (1959), if there ever was one” (“Time is Illmatic: A Song for My Father, A Letter to My Son,” 62); and Gregory Tate says that “Nas’s work exudes the ephemeral, fugitive resonance of trace memory-conjuring hardened lozenges of a ritual-habitual space time and chaos already vanished into thin air” (“An Elegy for Illmatic,” 237). This type of language is counterproductive; it works to further mystify rather than clarify what’s going on with Illmatic.
 
Some essayists implicitly reject the book’s conceit–that is, they fail to address the assigned track. In “‘Memory Lane’: On Jazz, Hip-Hop, and Fathers,” Mark Anthony Neal, an otherwise excellent cultural critic, only ostensibly writes about Nas’s “Memory Lane.” His essay, however, is a personal reflection on how the archive of black music audibly mediates father-son relationships that are otherwise marked by silence. As Neal puts it, “via sampling hip-hop has long occasioned opportunities for intergenerational conversation and intervention” (124). Kyra D. Gaunt’s “‘One Time 4 Your Mind’: Embedding Nas and Hip-Hop into a Gendered State of Mind” argues that Nas “is a perfect candidate for exploring gender issues within hip-hop” because “he has performed different manifestations of black masculinity and patriarchal dominance” (154). In each case, Nas’s songs are instrumentalized in service of persuasive arguments–but arguments that, to be frank, have little to do with Nas or Illmatic specifically. They could be made about any number of artists or albums.
 
If Born to Use Mics occasionally drifts away from Illmatic, its final section of reviews, interviews, and personal reminiscences redresses the situation, swinging the focus back to questions of production, consumption, and distribution. Especially useful is Jon Shecter’s “The Second Coming” (from the April 1994 issue of The Source). It presents interview excerpts from the rappers, producers, and executive producers involved in the recording process: Large Professor, MC Serch, DJ Premier, Q-Tip, L.E.S., Faith Newman, and, of course, Nas. It includes Nas’s description of his first attempts at being an MC: “The first time I grabbed the mic was at my man Will’s house–bless the dead. He lived right upstairs from me on the sixth floor. . . . We used to rhyme on ‘White Lines’ and that old shit. Then later on, he bought equipment, like turntables, fader, we was makin’ tapes like that” (214). Other excellent moments in the piece include one in which Larger Professor and DJ Premier say how excited they were by Nas’s first recorded appearance on Main Source’s 1991 recording “Live at the Barbeque.” And Illmatic‘s executive producer MC Serch explains the difficulty he encounters finding a label home for Nas: “I took [the demo] to Russell [Simmons] first, Russell said it sounded like G Rap, he wasn’t wit’ it” (216). These tidbits of information are instructive: they demystify the eschatological aura around Illmatic and ground the album in a series of strategic actions by various agents in the field of hip-hop.
 
“Remixes” also includes “Born Alone, Die Alone,” an illuminating personal essay by writer and filmmaker Dream Hampton. Hampton’s essay posits Nas’s Illmatic as an artistic common ground between otherwise aggressively antagonistic West Coast / East Coast factions embodied by Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G., respectively.
 
In 1994, Hampton was working as a journalist for The Source. For six months, she covered three court cases involving Tupac. During that period Hampton became friendly with Shakur. While staying in Los Angeles, where one of Shakur’s trials was taking place, Hampton got an advance-copy of Illmatic. She immediately dubs a cassette version for Tupac, who “was an instant convert” (243). The next day Tupac “arrived in his assigned courtroom blasting Illmatic so loudly that the bailiff yelled at him to turn it off before the judge took his seat on the bench” (243). Hampton subtly proposes that Nas’s lyrics on Illmatic inspired Tupac’s “first important album,” Me Against the World, recorded in 1994 (243).
 
Hampton tells another story, this one related to the Notorious B.I.G. Prior to relocating to L.A. for the Tupac trials, Hampton lived in New York. There, she got a copy of an Illmatic bootleg: “[I] seem to remember,” says Hampton, “passing dubs back and forth to my neighbor Biggie” (242; the two lived near each other in Bed-Stuy.) This would have been sometime in 1993, as Biggie recorded his debut album Ready to Die. This fact about the bootleg tape sheds new light on the call-and-response relationship between the two MCs. For example, in “Represent,” Nas says: “Somehow the rap game reminds me of the crack game, / Used to sport Bally’s and Gazelle’s with black frames . . .” The references to “Gazelle” sunglasses and the “rap game” / “crack game” equivalence are reiterated a year later in the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Things Done Changed”:
 

Remember back in the days, when niggaz had waves
Gazelle shades, and corn braids
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
If I wasn’t in the rap game,
I’d probably have a key knee deep in the crack game . . .

Nas via Hampton is a key agent who alters the making of seminal albums by both Tupac and Biggie.

 
Hampton’s recollections shed light on how hip-hop is produced and consumed. First, Hampton’s narrative turns on an empowering use of technology: she “dubs” cassette copies of Illmatic. The circulation of cassette dubs is analogous to today’s digital file-sharing and mix-tape culture. Hampton’s story demonstrates how hip-hop culture has always transformed technology, putting it to creative use.⁶ Second, Hampton is one of three women integral to Illmatic‘s history. She joins Faith Newman, one of the album’s executive producers, and “Shortie,” the writer who awarded Illmatic the “5 Mic” review. They demonstrate the active roles women play in hip-hop and offer a useful counter-argument to Kyra Gaunt’s aforementioned feminist critique of Illmatic. That Hampton, Newman, and Shortie are only present in the book’s final section is indicative of the kinds of material knowledge absent, at times, from the book’s first half. A more material approach to hip-hop would enrich the solid scholarship.
 
At times, Born to Use Mics seems overeager in its attempt to make Illmatic “relevant,” in the process ironically rendering the album, or rather the experience of listening to the album, irrelevant. However, on the whole, the book demonstrates how a single record can yield and absorb richly diverse readings from across the disciplines. In his introduction, Daulatzai indicates that Born to Use Mics is the first in a proposed series of books dedicated to examining individual rap albums. This means that the next few years may be an exciting time for hip-hop scholarship, as other deserving albums from hip-hop’s near past may soon be reintroduced into our historical consciousness.