Illmatic

Ten tracks in about forty minutes, and the subtractive test finds little, though not nothing. The Genesis must open: a train, film dialogue and an old verse played back set the record as a beginning and as a recording of a place. N.Y. State of Mind must follow, the night and its danger stated at full density. Life’s a Bitch turns the night to morning, a twentieth birthday, “my born day”, and its cornet coda is the father answering the son. One Love is the one place the record speaks to the absent. The test bites twice, and on a record of ten it bites hard. One Time 4 Your Mind is the slightest song, a relaxed restatement of what Memory Lane does better, and Halftime, made before the record, sits as a showcase more than a step. One soft track and one inherited one, a fifth of the record that could leave with little loss, hold the figure below the eight.

Score: 7.9 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. A young man raised in a public housing project lives inside a city that treats him as disposable, and he sees it whole: the economy of the corner, the police, the prison that has taken his friends, death so near that rest feels like “the cousin of death”. He sees it with a clarity the place did not expect of him, and the clarity is the claim: the projects have a mind, and it is precise. One Love keeps account, from outside the walls, of who was shot and who had a child; Life’s a Bitch states the ethic the condition produces, to live today. The sound discloses too, jazz loops heard as a mind at night. It stops short of the bar, and not narrowly, because the vantage is one: the women and the elders of the place are seen only in passing, and what is disclosed is one neighbourhood seen through one consciousness, a condition reported with precision more than opened beyond its block.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Elevation is real, cool and intermittent. The World Is Yours is the summit: Pete Rock’s piano phrase over a drum that rolls rather than hits, and a hook that asks “whose world is this?” and answers with a grant of the world to a boy who owns nothing. The cornet that closes Life’s a Bitch, Olu Dara improvising over the fading loop, is a second height, warm and unexpected. N.Y. State of Mind reaches the dreadful kind: Premier’s dark piano figure and the long unbroken first verse hold a tension close to terror. Memory Lane has a nostalgic lift. Halftime, One Time 4 Your Mind and Represent drive more than rise, and It Ain’t Hard to Tell is brilliance rather than height. Four heights in ten, of two kinds, reached in moments and not sustained: the record’s mode is the street at eye level, and between its heights it holds the ground rather than climbs. That holds the figure below the eight.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Myth is evoked often and set in one figure: the prodigy of the ruined city, the child who sees. The cover sets it, a photograph of Nas as a small boy laid over the street, and The Genesis names a beginning. Across the record he is the young witness of a place that cannot hear him, the voice that says what others do not say. The World Is Yours takes its title from Scarface, the gangster’s boast, and turns it toward a claim on the world made by mind rather than by force: a modern myth inverted in a hook. One Love is the old form of the letter to the prisoner. What holds the axis well below the bar, and lowest among the record’s axes: the figure is carried by the voice and the cover more than built by the sequence, and the prodigy, the prophet and the underworld are summoned more than given structure. The myth is everywhere in the stance and nowhere in the architecture, and myth firmly evoked is what the figure scores.

Score: 7.2 / 10

The inheritance is the New York rap of 1987 to 1993: Rakim’s interior rhyme and composure, Kool G Rap’s crowded narrative, the jazz-sample production of Pete Rock and of A Tribe Called Quest, the hard drums of the Juice Crew and Gang Starr. The turn is real but small, smaller than its fame. The record joins the densest rhyming of its day to first-person reportage of one place, in a voice level and observant rather than boastful or militant, while the West Coast’s gangsta records held the commercial centre. Its method was a wager in one respect, a debut spread across five of the city’s leading producers, and even that wager was placed with proven hands. What holds it well below the bar: every element was proven before, the producers brought their own established sounds, and the stake was a debut’s, not a standing risked. A wager placed on a proven path is not a swerve, and the record perfects a path more than it leaves one.

Score: 7.3 / 10

Change the form and the record loses part of what it knows. What it knows is that a mind can hold a whole neighbourhood in one breath, and the form is the dense verse, sixteen bars and more of internal rhyme with almost no hook, over a short loop that never resolves. In N.Y. State of Mind the first verse runs long with no chorus to release it, and the pressure of the place is the pressure of the form; the short repeating loops are the city’s sameness. The sequence is counted here, once: a beginning, a night, a morning, a grant of the world, a retrospect, letters to the absent and a close on pure skill, over two near-equal halves. Side two’s order is looser, and Halftime and One Time 4 Your Mind contain skill more than enact the knowledge: the form is the knowledge in the verse and in the strongest tracks, and nearer a container across the sequence. That holds it below the eight.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Evidence over thirty-two years, of an unusual kind for a popular record. The verses have been annotated line by line and taught in university courses, and a documentary, Time Is Illmatic (2014), was made of the record’s making. In the recording, return repays: the internal rhymes keep yielding sound patterns not heard at first, and the place names, nicknames and references open a social map of one housing project. Return yields less in the form: the loops are short, and the production does not reorganise on hearing. The depth is semantic more than formal, the reverse of Kind of Blue’s, and much of the semantic yield is reference, the names and places of one project, a map that once read stays read. The narrow formal yield and the finite map hold the figure below the eight.

Score: 7.9 / 10

The field is the hip hop of the 1990s and, within it, New York rap. Intrinsic force is moderate and real: the record set a standard of density and observation in the verse against which the decade’s rapping was measured, and showed that an album could be built from several producers’ best work without losing a single voice. It fixed more than it reorganised: Rakim and Kool G Rap had made the verse, and the jazz-loop sound was in place. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record became the measure of the New York lyric album; Mobb Deep, the Wu-Tang solo albums and Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt worked in the space it marked, a long line of later rappers followed, and the many-producer debut became the standard method of the major-label rap album. The reach is strong within its kind and narrower than the field’s epochal works: the record set a standard inside a music it did not redirect, and that holds it below the bar.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Survival is weighed over thirty-two years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued, in print since release, remastered and reissued in anniversary editions that leave the ten tracks intact. Presence is continuous and wide within its kind: the record is still bought, streamed and heard whole, its tracks played in clubs and on radio, its lines quoted in common speech and in later records. The fabric is fixed in part to its moment: the sampler and drum machine of 1993, the muffled low end of the mix, and the crack era and its weapons date the surface, and that surface has become the classic sound of its kind, a survival as the emblem of a period as much as past it. Form whole, presence wide but bounded by its kind, fabric dated: that holds the figure below the bar.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Command of the recorded medium, with the sense of the words weighed elsewhere; the rapped voice is counted as a rhythmic and sonic instrument. Nas’s delivery is exact: syllables placed across and against the beat, breath held through long lines, internal rhyme heard as rhythm, enunciation clear at speed, with almost no audible strain. Premier cuts his source into a figure that loops without seam; Pete Rock filters the bass under the piano so the track breathes; Large Professor turns a pop record into the hard, bright frame of It Ain’t Hard to Tell. Five producers hold one sound. The faults fall across a real share of it: loops arranged by repetition and drop-out only, a dull low end, a voice that sometimes sits in front of a thin track, and One Time 4 Your Mind plainly made. The voice is a master’s; the frame around it is sometimes only adequate, and the figure weighs both.

Score: 8.3 / 10

One law governs the record: one voice, level and watchful, over a short loop of jazz or soul at a walking tempo, saying what the place is. The two most distant elements obey it. The Genesis is a collage of a train, film dialogue and an old verse; It Ain’t Hard to Tell is a boast over a pop record. The first establishes the place and the voice’s origin in it; the last shows the voice’s power, earned by the nine tracks before. One Love, the most intimate track, and Represent, the most aggressive, are the same observer facing two ways, and five producers do not break the law. What holds the figure below the eight: the palette is narrow, one voice, one tempo band, one kind of loop, and narrowness is not coherence. The law holds because so little is asked to obey it, and the feeling runs from dread to pride with little outside it.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held fully, the watchful mind of a young man. The neighbourhood is held as a society, with named friends, corners and parks; labour as the street economy and its alternatives; the state as police and, in One Love, as the prison that holds half the record’s people. The family is held in moments: a birthday, a father’s cornet, a mother mentioned with love. Death is everywhere, and history is glimpsed in the record’s own past. What holds the figure lowest: the sacred is evoked and not held, the natural order is absent, and the world beyond the city appears only as a dream of escape. The family and history are glimpsed more than held. One neighbourhood is seen through one consciousness: several orders are joined there, and as many are only glimpsed or absent.

Score: 7.2 / 10