Illmatic is one of the best hip hop albums ever. I’ve often said it is the hip hop equivalent of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On. The artists perspective of someone else’s story. Ten songs no filler and the best producers of that time period. It stands the test of time.
An album that wasn’t necessarily the greatest of the great albums in 1994, but shifted hip hop in NY back to the top. The fact that an 18-19 Nasir Jones was spitting those lyrics with the team of heavyweights producing, adds to the legacy.
– from Quora
kids don’t know what they missed
–@FredtheBaker79
Does Illmatic still matter?
The 20th anniversary of Illmatic raises as many questions about where we are as an audience as it does admiration for the album. It’s a seminal work – a five mic album featuring a 18 year old prodigy who may be the most gifted 18 year old storyteller ever. The album also represents the Golden Age of hip hop when lyrics “mattered”, and a moment in New York’s scene that’ll never be recaptured. In a nostalgic sense, the way people talk about this mid-90’s era is hip hop’s version of baseball, with Nas, Biggie, Jay-Z, and Wu-Tang’s representing the Murderers’ Row of debut albums.
Today, samples are replaced by synths, album covers by album releases on Instagram, and five mic rating systems by crowd sourced aggregate ratings. 1994 is a world’s away from 2014.
Illmatic on Twitter
So what is Illmatic’s legacy today? Opinions ranged from “it’s the greatest” to “it’s one of the greatest”. Yet the two answers that most interested me were no less effusive, but represented a listening experience before social media:
it’s a top 5 album ever IMO. When that album dropped I damn near lost my mind. I was 15.
–@dg0370a
One of the great albums in my 32 yrs of living
– @JayPolk44
That’s what a generation gap looks like, I guess. And similar to the reaction of Outkast reuniting at Coachella, we fear the “kids these days” won’t get Illmatic, that so stuck to their smartphones and instant gratification of Facebook likes, won’t understand the complex rhyme schemes and depth of the production – the meaning of it all. Meanwhile, Nas did perform at Coachella these last two weekends. And a documentary on the making of the album, Time is Illmatic, premiered at the opening night of the Tribeca Film Festival.
The Enduring Legacy of Illmatic
For all its praise, it’s important to note Illmatic’s sales numbers: it debuted at #12 on the charts, selling 59,000 copies its first week (Ready to Die debuted at #15 with 57,000 sales its first week, but ended up selling over 5 million copies). All five singles failed to chart. The album went platinum in 2001, seven years after its release. So it resembles high art in that sense – we know we’re supposed to appreciate it, we know it’s incredible, but then there’s this Juicy J beat, and we’re at the club…
Of course, album sales don’t reflect impact. And there’ll never be another lllmatic – and not in a “there’ll never be another Michael Jordan” sense. The laws of music sampling won’t let it happen. And when was the last time you listened to Illmatic? But then again, what does telling people you’re listening to Illmatic add to your social media identity?
That’s probably too harsh. Maybe when it’s time to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Illmatic, the conversation will be lead by kids excited to see him perform the album at another festival in a far off California desert. And we may really see a hologram of Nas performing songs off the album. These social media conversations are the new measure for record sales. And for one week, at least, Nas took us back to 1994.
May 1, 2014
