Review:

on 2011-04-29 CharlesMartel Said:

Some time ago, a well-meaning friend, concerned that I did not like hip-hop, decided he would educate me. His didactic methodology left a lot to be desired however. I don't think I could take listening to six or seven albums, one after another, of any genre of music. Using that approach for hip-hop was no way to broaden my horizons and ultimately became self-defeating. He said he saved the best until last - that best was "Illmatic". By the time it came on I had taken enough. I panned it. I didn't want to hear any more hip-hop.

Having considered more of the genre since that evening and managed to find some hip hop that I actually like, I felt that perhaps the circumstances of my listening to this album had not been the best. Perhaps I had been overly harsh. So, I decided to go back to it and give it another go. I then downloaded six tracks from Limewire - my usual approach for testing any album to see if I like it enough to buy it - and set about giving it a thorough listen.

On the face of it, Nas often runs through the themes which are so common, and so unpleasant, in gangsta. A closer listen reveals that instead of using the language of the street to glorify the drug-dealing macho-man culture, he is actually using the language of the street to put into perspective what it really is, a wasteful, degrading and dehumanising blight on urban culture. You have to listen to pick up the irony, but it is there.

My other great beef with hip hop is the way the language is mangled - stressed and unstressed syllables twisted to fit into a beat rather than to go with the natural flow of the language. OK, this happens some time, but it is nowhere near as common as with many other hip hop acts. So, it looks like on two counts, I may indeed have underrated "Illmatic". Or did I?

By not really giving it a good listen to the first time, I overlooked both the positive and negative aspects. If there are positive aspects, like those I have mentioned above, there are also negatives, new negatives. For a start, a lot of the songs I downloaded seem to have a common theme of self-promotion. In short, the theme is basically "I'm nasty Nas and I got some cool beats". Now self-promotion on any album by any artist is really a poor basis for a song. A lot of artists do it and it sounds awful, bragging is what it is. Yet to put several tracks of it on one album is really going too far.

Then there are the beats. How much of these are sampled I don't know, but on some tracks, such as "NY State of Mind" it becomes repetitive to the point where it distracts you from the lyrics. That short (two second) sequence is repeated over and over and over and over again. You forget about the words, you just get that sequence rattling around our head, forcing everything else out of it. This may work in a club, as may the dense sound of "It Ain't Hard To Tell", but I was listening to this, not dancing to it.

What I didn't pick up the first time round, but what is so evident on repeated listens is the use of the N word. That word is surely a symbol of oppression, of discrimination, and the eradication of it is surely a key aim for ending the overt and implicit racism which has been directed against the black community for too long. So why would such an odious word be resurrected by the very people for whom the mere mention of word must conjure up such negative emotions? But there is worse. Am I the ONLY person who finds the following line, from "Halftime", utterly repugnant? -

"I rap in front of more n*****s than in a slave ship"

It trivialises one of the greatest crimes against humanity in history, and that trivialisation is done by someone who is still suffering the lingering consequences of that crime.

I will accept that my original opinion underestimated the album and some of its qualities. But the fact I wasn't listening properly allowed me also to overlook negative elements, including the truly repulsive lyrical content. Add stars for the quality and then take them away for the negative, and ultimately you are back where you started.
Rating: 1/10