Nas releases 'Illmatic'
Columbia issues the debut LP by 20-year-old Nasir Jones of Queensbridge. Across ten tracks, Nas works with a small bench of producers — DJ Premier, Pete Rock, Q-Tip, Large Professor, L.E.S. — and writes himself into the Bronx-Queens line of literary MCs that runs Rakim → Kool G Rap → Nas. The Source gives it five mics; the genre press treats it from week one as a landmark.
Why it matters
*Illmatic* is the East Coast's defining argument against the West-Coast-led commercial consensus of 1992-94. Its production roster — five of the most important producers in the genre working on a single 39-minute LP — is itself an argument for hip-hop as a producer's art form. Every subsequent New York debut for the next decade gets measured against it.
Branches
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