Adam Serwer reviews Born to Use Mics, a new anthology edited by Michael Eric Dyson:
Illmatic, the first album by hip-hop elder statesman Nas, is a masterpiece. Released in 1994, its tales of scowling corner boys, prowling drug addicts, undercover cops, treacherous lovers, and remorseful gangsters are so vivid that you can almost feel your nostrils being singed as Nas brushes the marijuana ash from his clothes. From out the gate, Nas identifies himself as a writer’s writer (“see with the pen I’m extreme”) and proceeds to prove himself right, offering lines that are poetic (“with more kicks/than a baby in a mother’s stomach”), bleak (“straight-up shit is real/and any day could be your last in the jungle”), and cautiously hopeful (“that buck that bought a bottle/could have struck the lotto”).
As the legend goes, the frenetic pace of Nas’ flow, his complex internal rhyme schemes, and his dense lyricism had people wearing out their cassette tapes, rewinding them over and over again in disbelief. It’s the one album in all of hip-hop whose artistic value, regardless of the critic’s personal taste, is unassailable. Even Nas’ longtime nemesis, Jay-Z, frankly confesses that the first time he heard the album, “the shit was so ahead/thought we was all dead.”