Nas - Illmatic

Last week I said I was becoming a West Coast hip hop guy. Nas must have heard me, because this one made me question my loyalties completely. It’s a little more hardcore than I typically prefer, but it brings the best parts of the 90’s east coast style together - the jazz influence, the underground freight-train-like beats, the gritty New York attitude of pretending to love living in the city because it makes you tough but low key hating every minute of it. (Side note - I feel like Stockholm syndrome could be renamed New York City syndrome. Might just be the country kid in me. Or the fact I live in a beach town where everybody’s from the Northeast US and spends all their time talking about how great NYC is, but for some reason never go back there).

Nas’s flow is smooth and he uses these multi-tiered rhymes that make you pause for a second to savor - but a second is too long to pause because you’re going to miss stuff. Listen to this one with the lyrics in front of you - I like using Spotify’s karaoke mode which follows along with each line - and you’ll fall into a trance trying to keep up. It feels like a movie to me, and it’s hard to believe this is a debut album.

From the roundup Jamwise #46 - Best Albums of 1994.