Illmatic is released

Why it matters

Illmatic came out on Columbia Records on April 19, 1994. Nas (Nasir Jones) was twenty. He had been writing since he was a teenager in the Queensbridge Houses and had been buzzing on cameo verses (Main Source's "Live at the Barbeque," MC Serch's "Back to the Grill") for two years before Columbia let him make the record. The album is ten tracks long. Forty minutes. Produced by DJ Premier, Pete Rock, Q-Tip, Large Professor, and L.E.S. Most serious-people lists of the greatest rap albums put Illmatic in the top five. Many put it at one. The reason is not just the production, which is the dream-team list of the best East Coast producers of 1994 each handing in a beat, and not just the lyrics, which are a twenty-year-old's view of a New York public-housing development described with literary care. The reason is that the entire album works as a single forty-minute argument for what rap can be when every variable is calibrated. The Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry. Nas has been chasing it for thirty years. Most rappers have been chasing it for thirty years. You should put it on.