Explain Nas' Illmatic To Me

im becoming a member of the NSO so i can get in on the pre-sale of this... feeling i might regret it... hope AZ shows up for his one verse

i've listened to this album a lot and loved it over the years but it always struck me how bad a lot of the answers were to sterl's provocations itt

like, yeah obviously there's lots of realistic detail and poetic facility in the lyrics but they're very hard to follow as narratives (not just because of nas's delivery), and you can only sell nas as a storyteller here if you try to get by on attitude instead of on like mid-career ghostface creative writing workshop storycraft

it struck me recently that ralph waldo emerson is conventionally faulted for some things related to things nas is faulted for. his writing is supposedly full of these intense gems that hang together in this entrancing way that has a tendency to seem like a tangle of empty rhetoric and attitude upon reflection, and his thought is supposedly kind of foolishly/blindly optimistic, in neglect of the facts. but the better things people write about emerson notice his continual oscillating between despair and hope, and his effort to find a way of, basically, being believable about the latter in the face of the former. so his writing is really self-conscious and concerned with its quality of consciousness, and unstable because it's trying to keep these seemingly opposed things in a kind of productive tension.

the knock against nas would be his nihilism instead of his optimism, but he has that same sort of all-encompassing ambition to take in all of life and the world at once, to be self-possessed in the face of it. and his lyrics are so complicated because they're pivoting all over the place between attitudes and frames of mind in response to the narrative details and the reminisces (lots of them for a 20-year-old!) and to nas's own attempts to be this idealist transparent-eyeball mc. and like emerson, super preoccupied with thinking/writing representatively so as to articulate something universal out of a local, everyday experience that people are usually dismissive of.

in other words hua hsu = star post itt

http://twitchfilm.com/2014/04/tribeca-2014-review-time-is-illmatic-an-illuminating-look-back-at-the-creation-of-a-hip-hop-classic.html#ixzz301ZK548s

Embedded in Nas' dark street tales are notes of optimism and hope, with the ultimate message to his listeners being, "I made it out of this alive, and so can you." A late scene that shows the announcement of a fellowship at Harvard named in his honor promoting hip-hop scholarship emphasizes this. Unlike most of the neighborhood folks whose photos were used for Illmatic's album cover art, Nas was able to escape the fates of death or prison, and Time Is Illmatic ultimately becomes a moving testimonial to how music literally saved Nas' life.

for me now, production is stone cold classic, but i never did really connect with the lyrics.

no contrarianism i do like some of the more animated delivery of other rappers way over nas' style here. did we ever discuss elzhi and elmatic? i'm not gonna say its better than illmatic, but i def enjoy listening to it more, maybe just because it feels fresher.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHBdH8aj5Co

http://emoji.fileformat.info/gemoji/corn.png

jfc

ez rock just died i'm gonna put up with this shit

lol the streets