Free Nas's Illmatic by Matthew Gasteier Page B

children from the real world, or at least strive to do so. Yet Nas has laid out his childhood reality on “N.Y. State of Mind,” and throughout the record. His dreams of leaving this reality behind are hindered by his youth at first, and then later by the terrifying realization that this is all he knows, that his reality is defined by his stories.
    Of course, to anyone who hasn’t experienced what Nas has,
Illmatic
is more storyboo than reality, a visual and visceral representation of a world they will never experience. One person’s reality is just as easily another ’s fantasy. Even Nas himself has been criticized by other s as someone who never actually lived the life he raps about in his songs. This argument seems useless in the face of such insight as Nas has provided throughout his career, but the idea that Nas could internalize a collective experience might even enhance his own mythology. It is a true talent that can absorb another person’s reality into his own mind and spit it out in such vivid detail that even people who could never imagine what he is talking about form an emotional connection to the experience.
    Ultimately, the irony of such a specific narrative is that the situation, as little as five years later, had shifted within even Nas’s own community. The reality Nas was escaping was one of the worst periods for inner cities in U.S. history. The Reagan years had seen crack flood city streets across America, and violence, particularly among young people, wasat stratospheric heights. Regardless of what caused the downturn of crime in the nineties, the results were real. Crime was down, drug use was down, murders were down. The reality that rappers depicted in their songs turned to hyperreal representations of the muted battles that had dropped relatively underground. Though no one would argue that the problems had gone away—or even lowered to anywhere near acceptable levels—the coincidence of hip hop’s rise to the top and a sharp drop in violent crime found fantasy trumping reality in the media.
    Walking through Nas’s neighborhood today, those changes are apparent. White Flight has reversed itself, as second-generation suburbanites have found themselves drawn to the metropolis, and New York City has found itself struggling to keep up with the upscale housing demand. This south-westernmost section of Queens might still have the requisite check-cashing storefronts and pawn shops a few blocks away, but hovering over it all is a sleepy white woman on a billboard cloaked in soft sheets and resting her head on her pillow. The ad pledges safety and cleanliness in those new condominiums by the train, a new and different kind of N.Y. state of mind.
    The harrowing account Nas spoke of had become an historical document on the cusp of this change. Listening to the album now you can hear all of the exhaustion, desperation, and anger that had been building for the past twenty years, not just in Nas’s life, but in the lives around him. But you also hear hope, redemption, and, in the distance, tomorrow. How few records can be said to evoke a specific time in American history, not because they were played a lot or they started a movement, but because you can listen to them and get a sense of what it was like to live in a specific time and place? If it is still far from actually experiencing it, then it is just as close as reading a book or watching a film about the experience, hardlyan achievement you would expect from a pop record, much less such an immediate and entertaining one.
    Meanwhile, as Nas sped through hip hop history at pace with the evolving genre, his fantasies, stretching over eras and continents, replaced the reality that wasn’t really there anymore anyway. The world had changed from one that seemed locked into a collision course into one that looked towards hope for a better day, just as Nas came to acknowledge the former. “When I listen to it now,” Nas says of the record, “I say,