Rappers I monkey flip ‘em

Everyone knows simply from the title what this blog posting is going to be all about. No ifs or buts. Because just like Posdnous said on De La Soul’s own brilliant and eminently repeatable “Stakes Is High” cut, every word I say should be a hip-hop quotable, and never could a truer word be spoken when thinking about Nas’ stunning debut long player, the magnificent “Illmatic”. When you return to this record, as we all do again and again, wondering if it will ever grow tired, ever show even the merest sign of losing its evergreen and golden status, just think about how its words have become embedded in your brain.

How the most intricate and beautiful of lyrical wordplay has become so integral to your own grey matter, has merged with your own thought processes so that you cannot now imagine a time when you couldn’t reel off every syllable, repeat every beat drop and inflection, ad infinitum. It is an example of why we love the music we do, why music has the power to move you in ways that defy explanation, and why hip-hop is the greatest.

I haven’t posted about “Illmatic” before, except in passing, because I have never really known where to begin. This is true of many of my favourite albums of course, the fear that analysing or reporting on them too heavily will somehow distil the magic, or that I will fail to do just service to their greatness with my own prosaic inadequacies. But hey, sometimes like Greg Luganis you just have to dive right in (and hope you don’t crack a skull on the way down). In fact the motivation came from a conversation with the one and only Jacksonian, and as we often do we found ourselves lamenting the lack of true classic albums these days.

We wondered if we are just getting old and the days of yore always seem more halcyon, which may well be the case, but really can it be the 1990s that we have to return to to find a true hip-hop classic. Even if we use the Source’s five mic rule it has been over four years, and that only takes us to Lil’ Kim. But having put the world to rights somewhat, my mind turned to what actually makes some of these records classics in the first place. A variety of reasons of course, but in returning to Nas’ own awesome opening salvo, one of the reasons I came up with is one which other people have sometimes maligned it for. And this is the album’s brevity, for me a huge reason for its longevity and retention of excellence on every single level.

No fillers, no unnecessary skits, one guest spot. Nine songs plus an allegorical and spiritual mosaic of an introduction, giving an album that simply demands full attention from the opening note to the closing beat. It is a classic album that works as a long playing record should do, each individual song worthy of close inspection and reverence, all first amongst equals, yet adding up to a whole that is simply beyond reproach. Thematically it glides in and out of the world that Nas knows, that he is describing in the minutest of details with his pen that has surely been dipped into the ink of magical inspiration, and paints a picture of life in his New York.

And yet while the scenes depicted may be recognisable to only a small fraction of the eventual listeners, the messages within are microscopic in focus and yet somehow universal at the same time. As a far better writer than me has stated, it encapsulates the struggle of humanity itself, the quest to stay true to your own essence.

And it seems to just burst out of nowhere. Think hard enough and you can go back to the time that you first heard it. Remember? How it just seemed perfect from the very first bar. How its timing and place in the re-emergence of East Coast sensibilities seemed so precise. It cannot take solo credit of course, but its significance is hard to overstate. Any song could illustrate virtually any point that you want to make about “Illmatic” such is its cohesion and overall excellence, but the opening “NY State of Mind” is my choice for today. Because the tale of its recording sums up much of what I have been trying to describe, which is that this is an album that is almost willed into being, is just so right on every level. Premier’s beat is rocking and Nas stands in the vocal booth, a young man who has created an incredible buzz and yet had to fight ridiculously hard for the deal that will take his words to the streets.

He stands, suddenly small in the loneliness of the studio, just him and a mic. Does the enormity of what he is striving to do overcome him as it appears it might. We all know the next bit as he limbers up with a “Yeah Yeah” and spars with the mic searching for his flow. “Straight out the fuckin dungeons of rap...” comes through but still no flow, and the production team implore him from behind the glass to hit the beat, they are already recording and time and tape is money. He states “I don’t know how to start this shit”, words of wonder now part of posterity’s pot of gold, but at the time a cold moment of anxiety. And then from nowhere the immortal lines, almost still wet on the page, burst forth, “Rappers I monkey flip’em with the funky rhythm I be kickin, Musician, Inflictin composition...”, perfectly timed, perfectly pitched, perfectly delivered, perfectly constructed. The studio, full of hip-hop veterans, stands in stunned silence. Something fundamental has changed. Illmatic has arrived. One love.