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The Stuff Legends Are Made of

The term classic is criminally overused in hip hop culture. It is very common for a fan to refer to a great album as a classic but it is a term that critics don't take lightly. It is easy to find a great record...but a MASTERPIECE is something much tougher to find (especially in a genre where rap fans are so fickled by the next hot thing). Perhaps no other album in the genre deserves the title more than the debut album by Nas.

Plain and simple, Illmatic is the most fearless, shocking, and literally unbelievable record I have ever listened to. It's the Michael Jordan of rap because every so-called great record that drops gets compared to it. There are no moments of vulnerablity. At only twenty years of age, nobody to this day has yet to match his lyrical wizadry with chilling imagery such as, "I never sleep, 'cause sleep it the cousin of death"; "I rap in front of more n****** than on the slave ships"; "I switched my motto -- instead of sayin f*** tommorrow/ that buck that bought a bottle could've struck the lotto." Reguardless of age, it was just DOPE.

You have to realize that Nas came onto the scene as a man-child in a broken land. People lost faith, "'Cause yeah we were beginners in the hood as five-percenters/ But somethin' must of got in us 'cause we all turned to sinners." So when Nas boasts that he loves "committin' sins," you start to believe him. The poetry is so heartfelt and intense. His letter to a locked up thug is brilliant on "One Love", "shorty's laugh was cold blooded as he spoke so foul/ only twelve trying to tell me that he liked my style/ then i rose, wiping the blunts ash from my clothes/ then froze only to blow the herb smoke through my nose." Timeless!

As far as singles go, "The World is Yours," stands as one of my all-time favorites. It is five minutes of rapperfection. The song is so lyrical that Nas doubles and triples up on metaphoars to give listeners different meanings. I remember when the source magazines jaws dropped at the release of "Halftime" in 1992. Nas snatched up all the quotables and highlights when it dropped on the Zebra Soundtrack. The same thing followed when "It Ain't Hard To Tell" dropped. The album just encapsulates hip hop history in it's purest form.

Overall, forty minutes is all the album needed. One remarkable guest appearance from AZ and a dream team line-up of producers put it over the top. Nas didn't think he was god, he just thought he was better and wanted people to know that for the future. However, the next day came and the man who was so ahead of his time would be forever shadowed by the MASTERPIECE in which Illmatic personified!