The Illmatic impact in Hip Hop 28 years later

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Nas’ Illmatic set the gold standard of what a real Hip Hop album is and how’s constructed. It gave the rise of the idea of albums consisting of multiple producers instead of the one producer format that was the standard prior to Illmatic. Illmatic was a game changer that forever transformed the landscape of Hip Hop especially on the East Coast. It raised the standard of production, lyrical style, content, technique and overall artist/MCs ambitious to be the best lyrically instead of street legend/hustler. Never in the history of Hip Hop has an album and MC been so unanimously praised and revered like Nas and Illmatic.

Rap geopolitics underwent a major shift after Illmatic. The album electrified Queensbridge hip-hop and, therefore, all of East Coast hip hop. Starting with AZ’s sublime guest spot on “Life’s A Bitch,” rappers like Mobb Deep, Tragedy Khadafi, Nature, Cormega, Noreaga, Capone, Raekwon, Ghostface, and even the Windy City wordsmith Common seemed to find new inspiration in Nas’ self awareness, internal rhyme schemes, and mastery of street detail. Rappers had to step it up—think of Ghost on “Verbal Intercourse”—and the consequence was a rise in East Coast rap’s in-depth self-conscious realism.

By Mikael Shimshon

In rap lyrics in 1994, mentioning legendary real-life criminals by name was uncommon. Hip-hop hardly ever discussed the real-life folks that lived in the streets, aside from the West Coast’s penchant for banging on vinyl. However, Nas kicked off something when he made references to legitimate street monarchs like the Supreme Team, Alpo, and Pappy Mason on “Memory Lane” and “The World Is Yours,” respectively. The recording and promotion of real-life street legends and their biographies began with the release of that song. Following were films like Paid In Full and American Gangster as well as periodicals like FEDS and Don Diva. Rick Ross came close to turning it into a career.

The entire movie Belly was influenced by Illmatic. Why else would the director Hype Williams choose Nasir, a non-actor, to play the starring role? Add to it the number of movie scenes that were taken verbatim from the album, including “One Love. The moment where they dramatize Nas’s phrase from “N.Y. State of Mind,” “Give me a Smith and Wessun, I’ll have niggas undressing,” is another example. It makes sense why critics described Nas’s raps as being cinematic.

Illmatic was deserving of the five-mic rating in The Source, which highlighted how significant the magazine’s rating system was to a developing hip-hop culture. West Coast artists complained that the East Coast bias of the “bible of hip-hop” was evident from the five mic rating, especially after The Chronic received only four and a half mics. The ranking system would eventually be compromised for numerous reasons one of them being Benzino the owner of the magazine and rapper rating his own album with 5 mics as a consequence it would never again be accepted enough to be the subject of such vehement argument, even though other albums would go on to be recognized as classics.

“Sleep is the cousin of death,” “half-man, half amazing,” and even the phrase “Illmatic” itself became slang for something remarkably dope, among other Nas-isms that took the world by storm. Nas’ poetry in Illmatic added new words and expressions to the vocabulary of hip-hop. Nas’ allusion to the blimp in Scarface in “The World Is Yours” has persisted as a cliché that hiphop has adopted.

There is a Jay-Z before Illmatic and a Jay-Z after Illmatic. Reasonable Doubt, an album distinguished by Nas-like introspection and Premier production, was made by the Brooklyn MC enough of a contrast from his fast-talking Jaz-O days. While Jay clearly owed Illmatic for his poetry style, on his next album, Jay had switched to more lucrative flows. His samples ( “Dead Presidents” uses the “World Is Yours” as a sample and name-drops notable names (in “Where I’m From,” Jay asks “Who’s the best MC?”). Biggie, Jay Z or Nas? “(as Nas would point out during their epic battle a few years later) hinted at Nas’ influence on Jay.

Jay claims that he asked Nas to contribute a verse on the 13th track of the album, “Bring It On,” but the Queens MC never showed up to the recording studio. A mature Jay-Z expresses his admiration for Nas’ groundbreaking work on 2009’s “A Star Is Born,” spitting, “I had the Illmatic on bootleg/The shit was that ahead, thought we was all dead,” despite the two musical titans’ eventual rivalry.