"N.Y. State of Mind" is released

Why it matters

"N.Y. State of Mind" is the second track on Illmatic and the first verse Nas raps on the album proper, after a one-minute intro. The producer is DJ Premier. The beat samples Joe Chambers's "Mind Rain" piano loop and Donald Byrd's "Flight Time" drums. Then Nas opens with one of the most cited opening lines in rap: "I don't know how to start this shit, yo." What happens next is the verse a lot of MCs spent the rest of the 1990s trying to write something equivalent to. Nas describes a specific Queensbridge street scene with cinematic detail (the corner, the chrome, the loaded gun, the precinct van). He does it in extended sentences that thread through internal rhymes. He raps in second person to himself sometimes ("you be havin' dreams that you the head of a Mafia family"). The verse is two and a half minutes. The verse is one continuous unbroken paragraph. "N.Y. State of Mind" is the song that announced Nas was the most technically gifted MC in New York at twenty. It is also, structurally, the song that opens the album that won the argument. You can put it on. The first eight bars do the entire pitch.