Product Description

Out of a seemingly endless array of hip hop albums, every now and again something fresh and powerful rises to the top of the pile. Hailing from the Queensbridge Housing Projects in Long Island City (home to Marley Marl among others), 20-year old Nasir "Nas" Jones is less concerned with being an impersonator than with being an originator, bypassing adolescent fantasies and B-boy braggadocio in favour of jazzy beats, rap noir realism and new answers to urban despair.
ILLMATIC is his story, a cautionary contemporary tale of the innercity streets, and as Nas makes plain on his opener, "The Genesis", this is what he does, with or without a record contract, and it's going to be served up straight, no chaser. Andbecause Nas has the courage to transcend popular trends, toseparate himself from the ranks of wannabes and me-toos, hemay be on the verge of inaugurating some stylistic changes of his own.
Production-wise, Nas has gathered together some of the superstars of the hip hop underground, producers the likes of Q-Tip, Pete Rock, L.E.S., DJ Premier and The Large Professor, but it is Nas' unique rhythmic cadences, his idiomatic sense of on-the-street wordplay, his disrespect forthe high time and the empty rhyme that distinguishes ILLMATIC. When Nas rocks the mic, it's not a hedonist's wet dream,but a depiction of urban hope and despair, and thanks to Nas' poetic insights, he soon transports you there (in a manner seldom seen in black pop since the days of Stevie's INNERVISIONS and Marvin Gaye's WHAT'S GOIN' ON?).

Track Listing

1. Genesis
2. NY State Of Mind
3. Life's A Bitch
4. World Is Yours
5. Halftime
6. Memory Lane (Sittin' In Da Park)
7. One Love (KER69JCS)
8. One Time 4 Your Mind
9. Represent
10. It Ain't Hard To Tell

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3838 in Music
• Released on: 1997-02-10
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Explicit Lyrics, Import

Amazon.co.uk Review
Nasir Jones made this debut album at the age of 20, already armed with the calm perceptiveness and been-there-done-that attitude of a much older ghetto vet, though sometimes his inner callow youth shows itself. Illmatic is a look back at a life spent in the culture of the projects, acknowledging joy as much as pain and taking note of violence as a fact of his environment rather than a focus of his life. It's enlivened by Nas's kicky, deep-threaded multiple rhymes--you can tell he grew up listening to Mr. Magic's rap show and internalising the secrets of everybody's flow--and by tracks from a bunch of all-stars, including the Large Professor, DJ Premier, and, most memorably, Q-Tip ("One Love"). --Douglas Wolk

Customer Reviews

Five mics
Greatest hip-hop album of all time, and possibly the greatest poetic work of the 20th century

QUEENS BRIDGE
Im keeping this short cause any real hip hop fan knows that this is one of the greatest hip hop albums of all time,the whole album is dope and lyricly its maybe the best,just one word needed to sum it up CLASSIC

Greatest Rap Album Ever Recorded
There, i've started off my review with that statement. So why do I think Illmatic is worth that accolade. Well, I'd say it's the greatest for a number of reasons, one of them being the impact this album had on the rap world. Nas practically invented a new style of delivery, which influeneced every rapper going, and most rappers still use this style to this day.

My other reason is the lyrics. Nas is a true poet, and possibly the best lyricist in the game ever, maybe not in terms of wordplay like Rakim, but just the ability to tell a story in an articulate way is just astounding. Tracks like N.Y. State Of Mind and The World Is Yours depict what life is like growing up in New York as a working class individual, and considering Nas was only 20 at the time, it's like Bob Dylan writing Blowin' In The Wind, for the 90's.

The album is short for a rap album, containing only nine tracks and one skit. The phrase quality over quantity springs to mind immediately, because for me, seven of the tracks I'd rate as 5-star classics. Rap just doesn't get any better than this. Show any hater who thinks they know about rap, and slags it off, this masterpiece, and they'll be converted.

For me, this is the greatest rap album ever made, and is in my all time top 10 of all genres. This is as essential as Sgt. Pepper's, London Calling, or The Queen Is Dead.