Future - "Reasonable Doubt was not hot when it dropped"

[mobbinfms]

00000000000000000000000000000022


It shipped gold because only 500k run of the initial album was all that was slated to print.
You could still find freeze rd everywhere before 97 and still find them in 98 and 99.


Art Barr

Yeah apparently it moved 420k in 96.
I understand how certification works.

 

[Art Barr]

Yeah apparently it moved 420k in 96.
I understand how certification works.

Really real talk,...
After the master p rant to expose the industry.
We really don't know what they sold because the labels were buying their own records.
So, all this talks of sales and blah blah blah was always a send off and I been told y'all that.
If it ain't a skill or cultural discussion who gives a fukk.
It is and was all fabricated when you talk about sales or popularity.
Plus it serves no purpose and has no cultural historical relevence either.
As it focuses on no skill and focuses on no part of the culture.
Why continue to talk about non-cultural artist as if they did sumfin beneficial to the culture and they did not.
Like jay or nas both got served by precipitating a battle.
so who gives a fukk.


Art Barr

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Well have to disagree on whether boom bap is the essence or "purest form of hiphop" since the disco era....

it is though and can't be argued against...,the only other style that can be mentioned is electro-hop/bboy music.

i definitley dont see it as the heart and soul of hiphop...and the sound mostly does nothing for me,not in my top 3 when it comes to production styles.

HipHop = New York (foundation) and no HipHop style represents that more than some boom bap with scratches or jazzy samples

If i close my eyes and point to that chart,most likely im pointing at a east coast nikka,i never doubted it had a major impact locally at the time of its release

ilmatic has been sampled/referenced by all regions...south,east, west, mid west, europe

Nas Music Sampled by Others

 

[bigbadbossup2012]

I always find it funny when people throw out that this was an easy feat back then, and act as if everybody was selling like that on a debut without major backing.

He was back by priority

 

[bigbadbossup2012]

it is though and can't be argued against...,the only other style that can be mentioned is electro-hop/bboy music.




HipHop = New York (foundation) and no HipHop style represents that more than some boom bap with scratches or jazzy samples
















ilmatic has been sampled/referenced by all regions...south,east, west, mid west, europe

Nas Music Sampled by Others

None of this changes the fact Illmatic flopped and changed nothing in 1994.
Posting links of nikkas talking bout it years later doesnt change that

 

[Big Mel]

Yeah he made SOME noise in NY, but nobody outside of that was checking for Jay at all.

Except for the 500,000 people that BOUGHT the album.

 

[Nostalgic]

You kinda contradicted yourself with these 2 statements. And I would disagree with this not being an age and "I was there to witness it" thing. You can't simply "research" everything

Sometimes you actually had to be there and of a certain age to know the climate of the times.

That's like taking seriously the opinion of somebody who never saw Jordan play simply because he said he "researched" YouTube clips of the man playing

I get what you sayin

It's kinda like sayin you researched certain issues in the civil rights movement
and then sayin you 100% felt their pain.

 

[Still Benefited]

u would be wrong. U think the whole argument is about sales and that's where u fukkin up at. Put it like this. If Jay came out with RD in 96 and everyone was actin like he revolutionized rhyming n shyt and had great critical and street reception. Regardless of his album sales. Future would be wrong. Nas with Illmatic was considered the nikka to bring the east back until Biggie came along wit that polished sound and crushed the buildings. Nas was being hailed as the next Rakim n all that shyt. Regardless of his sales. Regardless of what u feel. Hip hop at the time was very much a NY thing. It was still considered the mecca even tho the west was killin shyt. Nas was one of the artist to bring the surge back to NY. Along wit Wu Tang and Biggie. U can say he mattered more locally being that he was very much a big deal to what we was doin and being that we the mecca it mattered THAT much more on a hip hop scale. Jay wasn't even looked at in that way locally. Not nationally. None of that. He was a new cat wit a dope album. And people seem to not understand that. And it's not a knock on him. Look at him now. And his album has that status now. Not every piece of art is gonna be fully appreciated off bat. Some shyt needs to resonate.

Im not wrong,Futurenis comparing Jay to the nikkas who was on top around the time when Jay came out....if we do the same thing for the time Nas comes out it looks just about as embarrasing for Nas in comparison....it was nikkas who was way bigger had sales AND critical reception....for Jay to do those numbers he mustve had the streets somewhere on the east just like Nas,cuz he wasnt hot nowhere else....end of the day Nas couldnt compare to the big dogs side by side.

That mecca shyt was over by then,because there was a younger generation who didnt have to come up listening to east coast music....we didnt look at the east coast in awe like the older generation did,we had our own shyt....so unless u showed and proved and made noise in our region you was a afterthought period


And i think you mean Nas was the great white hope who was SUPPOSED to bring NY back,all that hype,second coming of Rakim,5 mics....then those numbers came back

He may have lived up to the hype locally,but the fact is he wasnt the one to bring the east coast back at that time,Biggie and Badboy did.....they even took Nas lyricist of the year award away,yet Nas supposedly changed the lyricism game like no one before him...i aint sayin he shouldnt have one,im sayin he didnt which speaks volumes

 

[Pop123]

No one who was actually around then disagrees with this, it can't be disagreed with, it's a fact, wasn't nobody talking about no Jay-z album back then.

 

[Jack Trippa 3z company ho]

Except for the 500,000 people that BOUGHT the album.

Yeah, and most of those sales were in NY guaranteed.

 

[Still Benefited]

See my friends,this is how you shyt on weak posters. This dude that was so adamant about Nas changing the game with Illmatic has NOW went back on a couple of his stances.
First it was "He changed the game from nikkas biting the west"
Now it's "he changed the game from stagnation to active"
First "people were doing alot of biting before Illmatic"
Now "the biting was from 1994 to 1996"
Which is during and after illmatic.
And this proves illmatic did nothing you said it did.
Your stagnation argument is Null too. Dont come around anymore
This debate is over you a fukkin clown and should stop debating nikkas whom really lived it.
@StillNotSoft ,it's over,this nikka dont want it.
He's finished.

We just been scrimmaging the last few pages

Felt like we just went through a 30 man royal rumble,after being one of the first ones in the ring

Good debate yall,any more contenders?didnt think so

 

[noodles]

No one who was actually around then disagrees with this, it can't be disagreed with, it's a fact, wasn't nobody talking about no Jay-z album back then.

Nobody. He was Biggie's Bleek...

 

[Still Benefited]

Yeah, and most of those sales were in NY guaranteed.

Apparently E-40 sold a million copies in the bay alone according to thecoli for years,but doing 500K in NY city is an impossible feat,or a crazy number to do

 

[IllmaticDelta]

None of this changes the fact Illmatic flopped and changed nothing in 1994.
Posting links of nikkas talking bout it years later doesnt change that

stop it.

East Coast Hip-Hop


Illmatic was critical in "restoring interest" in East Coast hip hop, particularly New York's hip hop scene.
Illmatic has been noted as one of the most influential hip hop albums of all time, with pundits describing it as an archetypal East Coast hip hop album.[3][90] Jeff Weiss of Pitchfork writes: "No album better reflected the sound and style of New York, 94. The alembic of soul jazz samples, SP-1200s, broken nose breaks, and raw rap distilled the Henny, no chaser ideal of boom bap."[20] Citing Illmatic as part of a string of notable albums released in 1994, David Drake of Stylus Magazine writes "This was the critical point for the East Coast, a time when rappers from the New York area were releasing bucketloads of thrilling work".[101] John Bush of Allmusic compares Illmatic to another DJ Premier production, The Sun Rises in the East (1994), as "one of the quintessential East Coast records".[13] Along with the critical acclaim of the Wu-Tang Clan's debut album Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) (1993) and the success of The Notorious B.I.G.'s debut Ready to Die (1994), Illmatic was also instrumental in restoring interest in the East Coast hip hop scene. "Rarely has the birthplace of hip-hop," wrote Rob Marriott of Complex, "been so unanimous in praise of a rap record and the MC who made it."[51] As Nas later recounted: "It felt amazing to be accepted by New York City in that way...at the time a lot of West Coast hip-hop was selling; East Coast wasn't selling as much, especially for a new artist. So back then you couldn't tell in the sales, but you could tell in the streets".[102]


Lyricism
Illmatic has been noted by music writers for Nas's unique style of delivery and lyrical & poetic substance.[24] His lyrics contain layered rhythms, multi-syllabic compounded rhymes, internal half rhymes, assonance, and ear-bending enjambment.[26] Music critic Marc Lamont Hill of PopMatters elaborates on Nas's lyricism and delivery throughout the album, stating "Nas' complex rhyme patterns, clever word play, and impressive vocab took the art [of rapping] to previously unprecedented heights. Building on the pioneering work of Kool G Rap, Big Daddy Kane, and Rakim, tracks like 'Halftime' and the laid back 'One Time 4 Your Mind' demonstrated a [high] level of technical precision and rhetorical dexterity."[32] Hill cites "Memory Lane (Sittin' in da Park)" as "an exemplar of flawless lyricism",[32] while critic Steve Juon wrote that the lyrics of the album closer, "It Ain't Hard to Tell", are "just as quotable if not more-so than anything else on the LP – what album could end on a higher note than this?":[28]


Focusing on poetic forms found in his lyrics, Princeton University professor Imani Perry describes Nas's performance as that of a "poet-musician" indebted to the conventions of jazz poetry. She suggests that Nas's lyricism might have been shaped by the "black art poetry album genre," pioneered by Gil Scott-Heron, The Last Poets, and Nikki Giovanni.[27] Chicago-based poet and music critic Kevin Coval attributes Nas's lyricism to his unique approach to rapping, which he describes as a "fresh-out-the-rhyme-book presentation": "It's as if Nas, the poet, reporter, brings his notebook into the studio, hears the beat, and weaves his portraits on top with ill precision."[26] Coval also comments on the rapper's vignettes of inner-city life, which are depicted using elaborate rhyme structures: "All the words, faces and bodies of an abandoned post-industrial, urban dystopia are framed in Nas's tightly packed stanzas. These portraits of his brain and community in handcuffs are beautiful, brutal and extremely complex, and they lend themselves to the complex and brillantly compounded rhyme schemes he employs."[26]


In 2002, Prefix Mag's Matthew Gasteier re-examined Illmatic and its musical significance, stating:

Illmatic is the best hip-hop record ever made. Not because it has ten great tracks with perfect beats and flawless rhymes, but because it encompasses everything great about hip-hop that makes the genre worthy of its place in music history. Stylistically, if every other hip-hop record were destroyed, the entire genre could be reconstructed from this one album. But in spirit, Illmatic can just as easily be compared to Ready to Die, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, and Enter the Wu-Tang as it can to Rites of Spring, A Hard Day's Night, Innervisions, and Never Mind the Bollocks. In Illmatic, you find the meaning not just of hip-hop, but of music itself: the struggle of youth to retain its freedom, which is ultimately the struggle of man to retain his own essence.[41]



West Coast Hip-Hop
The critical acclaim surrounding the album also helped to shift attention away from the melodious, synth-driven, and funk-induced G-funk subgenre, which dominated the charts for some time after Dr. Dre's The Chronic (1992).[108] Citing the example of Snoop Dogg's wildly popular Doggystyle (released six months prior to Nas' debut) author Matthew Gasteier writes, "The first thing immediately noticeable about the [Source magazine] review, is that, like essentially every other review about Illmatic in publications like Vibe, Spin, Rolling Stones, and The New York Times, it mentions Snoop Doggy Dogg's Doggystyle in the first paragraph."[80] That nearly every reviewer felt the need to contextualize their response to Illmatic within the frame of West Coast G-Funk "is a reminder of just how pervasive the style was within the hip hop world and the music community as a whole."[80]

Yet according to writer Mickey Hess, Illmatic was among those East Coast records that helped "create sparse, rough and rugged soundscapes that clearly differed from Dre's multi-layered melodies."[109] As Allmusic's Steve Huey writes, "It helped spearhead the artistic renaissance of New York hip hop in the post-Chronic era, leading a return to street aesthetics."[62] Contrasting these aesthetics with the themes found in G-Funk, writer and filmmaker Dream Hampton writes, "Illmatic was a dirty bomb thrown at the orchestral sonic soundtrack that was The Chronic... This wasn’t a backyard bikini barbeque where the Ohio Players and DJ Quik were mashed up; this was a three-month bid on Rikers Island, a dirty dice game, blunts of brown Brooklyn sparked in the park after dark."[110]

Despite these regional differences, Hampton credits Illmatic with providing a common artistic ground for rappers on the West Coast and East Coast rap scenes. In the 2009 essay "Born Alone, Die Alone," she recounts the album's impact on West Coast artist, Tupac Shakur.[110] While working as a journalist for The Source in 1994, Hampton covered three court cases involving Tupac. Around this time, she received an advance-copy of Illmatic and immediately dubbed a cassette version for Tupac, who became "an instant convert" of the album. The next day, she writes, Tupac "arrived in his assigned courtroom blasting Illmatic so loudly that the bailiff yelled at him to turn it off before the judge took his seat on the bench." In her essay, Hampton implies that Nas' lyricism might have influenced Tupac's acclaimed album, Me Against the World, which was recorded that same year.[110]

West Coast artist The Game also recounts the impact of Illmatic for fans like himself outside of New York. In his collaboration with Nas on "Hustlers" (2006), he retells an episode taking place during his youth, where he decided to shoplift both Illmatic and The Chronic: "1995, eleven years from the day/I'm in the record shop with choices to make Illmatic on the top shelf, The Chronic on the left, homie/Wanna cop both but only got a twenty on me/So fukk it, I stole both, spent the twenty on a dub-sack/Ripped the package of Illmatic and bumped that/For my nikkas it was too complex when Nas rhymed/I was the only Compton nikka with a New York State of Mind"

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Big Hutch On "Illmatic": Nas Bridged Lyrical Depth, Hardness

On the eve of Illmatic’s 20-year anniversary, the Pomona, California rapper-producer says that Nas’ debut album required a deft production touch.

“When it’s a concept type of situation, I think that there’s a bigger, deeper process of producing something,” Big Hutch says during an exclusive interview with HipHopDX. “So when you look at a record like Illmatic, and a lot of records from that era, they’re actually produced from the perspective of an artists’ perspective, as if the producer’s an artist. We talk about it with storytelling albums, there’s a thing that has to be set. In order to make records like that, as far as production is concerned, they had to come in and produce as emcees.

“In order to like a Nas in that era, you really had to produce him,” Big Hutch continues. “Regardless of the fact of what his point of view is coming from, in order for you to make a record like that, I think the production part of it was the key thing of it. The producers in that era and that were around that actually had to be in tune with what the emcee was doing.”

Big Hutch, who released his The Big Hit album earlier this month, says that Nas was different than the typical rapper who was releasing material in 1994.

“If you look at the climate of ’94, it was like you were known for being hard,” Big Hutch says. “That was a hardcore time in the industry, basically. I think the significance of that record was that it bridged lyrical depth and hardness. And you couldn’t do that a lot in that era. That had kind of faded out when a lot of the harder stuff came, like Wu-Tang Clan, Above The Law, N.W.A.

“He was never known as a backpack rapper,” Big Hutch continues. “He was always known as a lyrical killing rapper, but he always said shyt that was real rooted to the G’est of the G and the hardest of the hardest emcees. He got respect from both ends of the spectrum.”

Big Hutch On "Illmatic": Nas Bridged Lyrical Depth, Hardness