Last month, ScHoolboy Q told Complex that Nas' It Was Written is a better album than Illmatic. Whoa! What?! This is heresy! Blasphemy! Was he kidding?
Illmatic is the hip-hop bible. The greatest rap album ever recorded. The gold standard. Heads can recite every single verse in their sleep, and even cursory rap fans know that it’s the Holy Grail. Illmatic is the pinnacle of hip-hop; it gets no better. It Was Written? A famous instance of a rapper compromising the art for commercial reasons. A bid forpop radio appeal that succeeded sales-wise, but was, as Insanul Ahmed noted yesterday in our Most Anticipated Albums of 2014 list, "ultimately disappointing." Everyone knows this, right?
Wrong. For all the ways the bible changed the world—all the various sects of the Christian church, all the religious fanaticism, all the crusades and missionary movements—you’ve read more gripping books, haven’t you? It Was Written is one of those books. Storylines, concept songs, new characters. It had chart-topping singles and gritty street joints side by side. Nas kept it thug over squeaky-clean Trackmasters beats and even threw a couple jabs at Jay Z in the process. Not only had he updated his style, he'd improved upon it. Time heals all backpacker wounds, and the past 18 years have revealed one essential truth about Nas’ discography: It Was Written is better than Illmatic.
They say that limits make you creative. Too many options offer too much freedom, allowing for laziness and sloppiness. Illmatic had laid bare the boom-bap landscape, and Nas had covered every inch. Beats from DJ Premier, Large Professor, Q-Tip, Pete Rock—he'd mastered them all, he'd conquered that arena. He needed a new challenge, a new adventure. His first choice to produce his second album was the legendary Juice Crew founder Marley Marl; Nas remembered the impact that Marley’s seminal work with L.L. Cool J had on him. But while they were both originally from Queens, Marley Marl lived far away from Nas, and the two had trouble getting into the studio together as often as they would have liked, so the idea of making an album together fizzled.
Which is a good thing. Another album built around classic hip-hop styles, an Illmatic 2, in theory, would have been boring. Give fans too much of exactly what they want and you cease to be an artist. You become something more like a soda jerk.
Steve Stoute knew that Nas was destined for big things. He was so inspired by Illmatic that he drove straight to Queens in his Lexus. When he pulled up to the projects asking questions, Nas’ brother Jungle pulled a gun on him. But once he'd found him, Stoute told Nas of the vision he had. Nas liked what he heard. Stoute began to manage Nas—adding him to a stable of artists that included a rising pair of producers, Poke and Tone, known as The Trackmasters. They had gotten their start doing beats for the likes of Chubb Rock, Kool G Rap and Roxanne Shante, but by 1996 they had started to crossover with production for Mary J. Blige and Soul For Real. Stoute saw an opportunity to put Nas’ gritty tales over the more polished, melodic beats The Trackmasters specialized in, and thus It Was Written was born.
When Nas was coming up, he hung with Tragedy Khadafi and Cormega, and he picked up his style from '80s stalwarts like Rakim and G Rap. (Tragedy had coined the term “Illmatic” six years before Nas’ debut.) When Illmatic dropped, that context was obvious to people that were aware. Nas wasn’t able to transcend the East Coast at the time because he was still attached to those homegrown sounds of traditional boom-bap, drum breaks and monotone Rakim flows, so Illmatic didn’t sell like everyone in that bubble thought it would. Once The Commissioner leaned on him for a more commercial appeal, It Was Written allowed Nas to become a worldwide star.
The first song, “The Message,” immediately let people know that this wasn’t like the previous album. Soft Flamenco guitar leads the track (Sting's "Shape of My Heart"), suggesting a more worldly and musically ambitious sound than any on Illmatic, before the drums drop and Nas kicks the door in: “Fake thug, no love, you get the slug/CB4 Gusto, your luck low/I didn’t know 'til I was drunk though.” The internal rhyme technique, heavy on syllables, had remained the same (or gotten better, even). But Nas has changed his subject matter in an attempt to grab the attention of listeners. Instead of dice games
This was Nas stepping outside of his own experiences (“This nikka never sold aspirin, how he Escobar?” his rivals would later gripe) and into the role of Escobar, a mafioso gangster to match the personas that Jay Z and Raekwon and Ghostface were popularizing at the time. Whereas Illmatic presented Nas as a street poet, writing about what he saw from his project window
