Illmatic

Nas was twenty years old. He had grown up in the Queensbridge Houses in Queens, one of the largest public housing projects in the United States, watching the crack epidemic tear through his neighborhood and losing friends to violence and prison with enough regularity that he later said the ghetto taught him to think about the future. The Source gave Illmatic five mics on release, one of the rarest ratings the magazine had ever given. They were right to.

What makes the album structurally unusual is that Nas did not choose a single producer. He assembled five of the best in New York — DJ Premier, Pete Rock, Large Professor, Q-Tip, and L.E.S. — and gave each one a song or two, creating a record that sounds like a unified vision despite being built by entirely different people in entirely different rooms. The sessions ran across multiple studios in Manhattan through 1992 and 1993, and the album clocks in at under forty minutes. There is not a wasted bar anywhere on it. "N.Y. State of Mind" opens over a Pete Rock piano loop and Nas delivers twelve minutes worth of imagery in four, painting Queensbridge in cinematic close-up with a precision that nobody in hip-hop had managed before. "The World Is Yours" samples Ahmad Jamal's "I Love Music" into something hymn-like. "Memory Lane" features Nas rapping over a DJ Premier beat built from a Reuben Wilson jazz record.

West Coast rap had dominated the early nineties. Illmatic changed the conversation entirely and handed New York the microphone back. It is widely regarded as the greatest debut album in hip-hop history, and that assessment has not aged a day.