JULYJULY 2019 2019 —— 5757critics called “poetic realism”. Serious praise for someone
who had just turned 21.
The opening of “It Ain’t Hard To Tell” – the first taste
of Nas for thousands of people who didn’t immediately
purchase the album – is strongly representative of his
style, which is probably why it was made into a music
video. “It ain’t hard to tell, I excel, then prevail / The
mic is contacted, I attract clientele...” Those two lines
alone contain internal rhymes, examples of assonance
and slant rhymes. They are an impressive marriage of
relevance and skill, showcasing just what makes rap
such a compelling art form, and why Nas’ flow is easy to
identify but hard to replicate.
When I eventually did get around to listening to the
album in its entirety, one of the things that stood out,
almost at once, was the sound. This was a period when
heavy bass and rock samples were routinely used as
the bedrock for rappers to rhyme over. Nas, on the other
hand, seemed to favour what sounded suspiciously like
piano and avant-garde jazz. I didn’t recognise any of the
samples he used, which was great because it pushed
me, and others like me, into all kinds of directions as
we searched for the origins of those tunes. For those
who did understand them, it made for a more profound
listening experience – which is how Illmatic managed
to attract African-Americans as well as suburban
Bombayites who cared enough to listen.
It was also a welcome change from the gangsta
rap that would eventually define that decade and
overwhelm it, creating superstars in the process while
simultaneously tainting the movement and reducing it
to the simplistic braggadocio so many of us still mistake
it for. What Nas was consciously doing is what pioneers
across genres of music have always striven for, and
only sometimes succeeded at: He was going against the
grain in an attempt to break the mould.
Nas’ last major appearance was in 2018, on his self-
titled album, produced by Kanye West. Its second track,
“Cops Shot The Kid”, gets its name from the recurring
sample of a song called “Children Story” by Slick Rick.
“White kids are brought in alive,” he raps, “Black kids get
hit with like five.” In that pithy couplet, he encapsulates
the rage that launched the Black Lives Matter
movement. Much of what Nas has been saying on his 11
studio albums covers themes such as urban poverty, inner
city violence and the damage inflicted by gang rivalries.
The recent murder of rapper Nipsey Hussle, on the
opposite coast from where Nas grew up, shows that little
has changed on the ground. That Nas’ arguments are still
valid a quarter of a century later can be depressing to
think about, but credit to him for constantly finding new
ways of putting his ideas across. The message itself may
be worn out, but the messenger is potent.
I can still listen to Illmatic and stumble upon
something new every once in a while. The sounds are
still fresh, the words still compelling. In an age of
streaming singles and music that dates within a week,
there just aren’t many albums one can say that about.
Lindsay Pereira is a regular contributor to GQ India. He is currently listening to
classic hip-hop on loop and waiting for new music from Kanye West. You can
follow him at @lindsaypereira on TwitterSushmita Sen and
Aishwarya Rai loomed large
in India’s consciousness back
in the summer of 1994. The
former was crowned Miss
Universe that year, while
the latter took home the title
of Miss World. For me, both
events faded in comparison
to the suicide of Kurt Cobain,
lead singer of Nirvana, whose passing shook me like the
death of someone particularly close. This doesn’t make
sense now, in hindsight, but felt normal at the time
because, as teenagers, we tend to give our heroes a lot
more importance than our family members.
A lot of us back then, a captive audience in the dawn
of satellite television after economic liberalisation
finally came to India, seemed to have singers,
musicians and bands as personal heroes. Movie stars
from Hollywood were as big as they are today, but we
couldn’t track their lives on an hourly basis the way
Instagram now encourages us to. Instead, some of us
used our free time to minutely pore over albums and
try to make sense of individual songs in a manner that
short attention spans have now rendered obsolete.
In April that year, the American rapper Nas
(presumably shortened because Nasir bin Olu Dara
Jones wouldn’t fit on cassette covers) dropped his
debut studio album, Illmatic. It was introduced on
MTV India via a music video for the last track, “It
Ain’t Hard To Tell”, and promptly dropped out of heavy
rotation a few weeks later. There were bigger releases
and events occupying MTV’s attention at the time,
given that Roxette had released Crash! Boom! Bang!,
rapper Warren G had made a bigger splash with his
debut Regulate...G Funk Era, Blur had effectively
kicked off Britpop with Parklife, Green Day had turned
into stars overnight with Dookie and Michael Jackson
had married Lisa Marie Presley.
Illmatic could easily have faded away like so
many rap albums of its era that were almost wilfully
entrenched in their geography and milieu. Slowly,
and almost inexplicably, however, it started to gain
momentum. By the end of that decade, it had achieved
platinum status in America. There was no similar
groundswell in India, of course, because a movie like
Gully Boy (which Nas executive produced) was still
decades away from conception. But Nas still managed
to make an impact among those who dutifully tuned
into the show Yo! MTV Raps. Twenty-five years after its
appearance, Illmatic routinely tops lists of the greatest
and most influential hip-hop albums of all time.
There were early whispers of greatness within the rap
community, even if they weren’t obvious to listeners like
me on the other side of the planet. As a young rapper,
Nas was sometimes referred to as the new Rakim, a
huge honour given that the MC has long been celebrated
as one of the most skilful writers to wield a microphone.
As reviews of Illmatic started to trickle in, there were
repeated references to his disavowal of gimmicks, the
refreshing absence of cliché and the power of what some