Illmatic

Nasir Jones was 20 when Columbia released Illmatic on 19 April 1994. He had started the lyrics at 16, in the Queensbridge Houses in Long Island City. He had called himself Kid Wave, then Nasty Nas, and he had asked his neighbour Willy Graham to be his DJ. Large Professor, from Flushing, put him on Main Source. MC Serch, after 3rd Bass split, found out at a session for his own single Back to the Grill that Nas had no contract. Serch has said he took the demo to Russell Simmons first, and that Simmons passed because it sounded like G Rap. Faith Newman at Sony told Serch she had been looking for Nas for a year and a half. Newman and Serch became the executive producers. The producers on the record were already the people a New York DJ trusted with a break: DJ Premier, Large Professor, Pete Rock, Q-Tip, L.E.S., and Nas himself. The sessions ran through 1992 and 1993 at Chung King, D&D, Battery and Unique.

The cover is a child and a housing project. The Library of Congress essay written for the National Recording Registry notes that the sleeve sets Nas’s face at seven against Queensbridge, and that the introduction, The Genesis, lifts dialogue from Wild Style plus a scrap of his own verse on Main Source’s Live at the Barbeque. That 1991 cameo, recorded when he was 17, is the first time a lot of people heard him. Halftime, his first solo record, had already been on the Zebrahead soundtrack in 1992. By the time the album arrived it had been bootlegged hard. Wikipedia records the critic Jeff Weiss’s report that Serch said he found a garage holding 60,000 unofficial copies. Queensbridge did not wait for Columbia’s release date.

The first commercial week did not match the hunger. Illmatic entered the Billboard 200 at number 12, with 59,000 copies sold, and that was its peak. The singles did not carry it. Halftime reached number 8 on the Hot Rap Singles chart. Life’s a Bitch did not chart. The RIAA certified the album gold on 17 January 1996, after shipments of 500,000, and platinum on 11 December 2001, after a million. By 6 February 2019 the sales note on Wikipedia put it at 2 million copies in the United States. The Source gave it a five-mic rating on release, the magazine’s highest mark. Jon Shecter, a co-founder, had a copy eight months before the date and pushed for that review. The Registry added the album in 2021. Rolling Stone’s 2020 edition of its 500 greatest albums placed it at number 44. The reputation walked ahead of the shipment numbers for the whole decade.

Heard from the side of the music that cares who chopped the sample, the album is five producers agreeing to leave room for one voice and one neighborhood. Premier’s N.Y. State of Mind is a piano and a drum that do not crowd the rhyme. Pete Rock, Q-Tip and Large Professor were already deciding how a loop sat in a New York record before this debut asked them to do it for a kid from the projects. Columbia distributed that decision. The avenues are named often enough that a listener who has never been to Long Island City still comes away with a map. Willy “Ill Will” Graham, Nas’s DJ and friend, was shot dead in Queensbridge on 23 May 1992. Nas’s brother was shot the same night and survived. Nas has called it a wake-up. The publishing name on the songs is Ill Will Music. That credit is also a grave.

A major-label debut that does not cross over, then spends decades being treated as the measure of New York rap, is a particular kind of object. The shops were slow. The people who were dubbing the breaks were not. Illmatic XX, the twentieth-anniversary issue, was counted with the original under Billboard’s rules. In 2014 it sold 15,000 copies in a week and re-entered the Billboard 200 at number 18, an 844 percent gain. The first pressing had never really been the audience. The audience had the record already, on a copied tape, with the project on the cover and a dead friend’s name in the publishing line.

Sources

• Illmatic: Columbia, 19 April 1994, the producers, the studios, the first-week sales, the bootleg report, the RIAA dates, Ill Will Graham.
• Library of Congress, National Recording Registry essay on Illmatic: the cover, Wild Style, Live at the Barbeque, the producers.