"The World Is Yours" is released

Why it matters

"The World Is Yours" is the fourth track on Illmatic and the first single Columbia released ahead of the album. Pete Rock produced. The beat is a slow, warm piano-and-bass loop built on a sample of Ahmad Jamal's "I Love Music." Nas opens with "It's yours," then rolls into one of the most-quoted second verses in mid-90s rap. The title is a direct reference to the line carved into the blimp at the end of Brian De Palma's Scarface. Nas, in 1994, is sitting in the Queensbridge Houses watching that film and pulling the phrase out of the credits and putting it onto an Illmatic track. The whole album does this. The album takes the visual vocabulary of the 70s and 80s gangster-cinema canon and rewrites it as the lived experience of a 1990s Queens teenager. "The World Is Yours" is the song that says that out loud. Pete Rock's beat is one of the most beloved beats of his career. You can find a hundred MCs on YouTube freestyling over it, even now. The beat has had a life of its own.