44. Nas, "Illmatic"

 

There have been albums on this list that I love, and albums that my friends love, and albums that I just know are somebody's favorite album, but as far as I know this is the first album on the list that I know for a fact is one of my friends' favorite albums.  I wasn't nearly cool enough to be listening to this when it came out in 1994 and so discovered it years later, after a What Is Your Favorite Album talk with that friend, and I distinctly remember listening to it in the back row of a 5 Fulton outbound bus and just being blown away.

There are few albums as directly connected to a specific place as this album is to New York City.  The very first sound you hear is the chunka-chunka of the train and then a sample from the 1983 movie Wild Style, regarded as the first hip hop movie.  The second song, "N.Y. State of Mind," is even more explicitly about NYC.  Set over a sample from Joe Chambers' "Mind Rain" and drums borrowed from Kool and the Gang's "N.T.," the song paints a harrowing picture of the drug trade in the city, with one of Nas' best raps:

I'm takin' rappers to a new plateau, through rap slow
My rhymin' is a vitamin held without a capsule
The smooth criminal on beat breaks
Never put me in your box if your shit eats tapes
The city never sleeps, full of villains and creeps
That's where I learned to do my hustle, had to scuffle with freaks
I'm a addict for sneakers, 20's of Buddha and bitches with beepers
In the streets I can greet ya, about blunts I teach ya
Inhale deep like the words of my breath
I never sleep, 'cause sleep is the cousin of death
I lay puzzled as I backtrack to earlier times
Nothing's equivalent to the New York state of mind

The album did not set the world on fire when it was first released, only selling like 330,000 copies the first year, but it was one of the only debut albums to get the coveted 5 mics from The Source, the equivalent of a hip hop christening.  The first single, "One Love," is also probably my favorite song on the record.  Q-Tip produced the track and sang the hook, and expertly used the drum break from Parliament's "Come In Out the Rain" and the bass and piano from the Heath Brothers' "Smilin' Billy Suite Part II."  The song is styled as letters Nas is writing to friends in the pen about what's going on back home, and Nas' tight rhymes absolutely glide over the silky-smooth beat.  Just a great song.

In fact, the whole album features just the absolutely perfect use of samples.  Not just a groundbreaking album, it's a great sounding album.  Like "Represent" rides on three chime sounds, which turn out to be from an orchestral recording from 1924 for the "Thief of Baghdad" silent film accompaniment.  Is that the oldest sample on a hip hop song?  Maybe!  If nothing else, this album is a crate-digger paradise.

Like I said, the album wasn't an immediate smash, but has since gone on to be recognized as one of the best hip hop records of all time (or maybe THE best hip hop record of all time), and was undoubtedly incredibly influential.  I mean, how many rap albums have entire scholarly treatises written about them?

Is this album in my personal Top 100? No.