Nas's Illmatic by Matthew Gasteier

‘God, this is what was on my mind at this age? How can that be? How can it be that this is what my reality was?’” If Nas truly couldn’t see the forest for the trees when producing
Illmatic
, then his next step, from acknowledging the limitations of his reality to hoping, perhaps believing, that there was a way out, is a powerful indication of the kind of assault his “walls of intelligence” could withstand.

Chapter Six
Faith/Despair
    “That’s what this is all about, right? Clothes, bankrolls and hos, you know what I’m saying? Yo, then what, man, what?”
    Nas asks for more in the brief intro to “Life’s a Bitch,” the third track on
Illmatic
. Though he puts it in his friend AZ’s words, Nas at 20 years old had confronted his reality with a simple refrain: “life’s a bitch and then you die.” If “N.Y. State of Mind” painted a picture of Nas’s reality and “One Love” saw him confronting it, forced to recognize its limitations and, finally, its fatal flaws, then this song is Nas beginning to struggle with his next step. How could he ever get past his reality?
    AZ’s verse on the song, the only guest appearance on the record, is Nas’s reality personified, drained of any hope but the kind reserved for those endowed with the “street ghetto essence.” This is a future of “stackin’ plenty papers, keepin’ it real, packin’ steel, gettin’ high.” The Brooklyn rapper who, like Nas before him had with “Live at the BBQ,” burst onto the scene with this first-ever recorded verse crystallized the hip hop gangsta world view with his rhymes in the first few couplets:
    Visualizing the realism of life in actuality
    Fuck who’s the baddest, a person’s status depends on salary
    And my mentality is money orientated
    I’m destined to live the dream for all my peeps who never made it.
    This doesn’t sound so different than Young Jeezy saying “I command you niggas to get money” or even 50 Cent’s famous credo
Get Rich or The Tryin’
. AZ looks back to a time before “all of us turned to sinners,” but simply shrugs and says “something must have got in us.” His flippancy is balanced with a determination to keep his head down and power through tough times. Nas struggled to rise above the fray in “N.Y. State of Mind,” refusing to get stuck in the game, but here AZ seems mired in the thick of it all, focused on every day because, he is convinced, focusing on the big picture can only lead to despair and the inevitability of death. There’s no heaven here either, because in this worldview, we all “turn to vapors” and then disappear.
    But even here, following AZ on “Life’s a Bitch,” Nas offers hope and the promise of redemption in an odd but beautiful line:
    I switched my motto, instead of saying “Fuck tomorrow,”
    That buck that bought a bottle could have struck the lotto.
    Apart from the technical pleasure of this couplet, including the complex rhyme scheme, the double-consonant word choice, and the unobtrusive alliteration, Nas has said something rather profound here. And yet…are we being asked to choose between alcoholism and gambling? It’s true that the “lottery” for Nas isn’t just gambling, but making music or getting an education, or really any possible way out of the ghetto for a kid growing up surrounded by poverty; the chances must seemthat minute. But the lotto isn’t a metaphor for Nas, or at least that kind. He is using a beer and a set of numbers as opposing outlooks on life. One represents resigned despair, the other , a serious—if mathematically illogical—display of faith.
    Nas is not the first person in popular music to adopt (or even then reject) the cynical battle cry “Fuck tomorrow.” The Who’s “My Generation” finds them defending their own, asserting “hope I die before I get old” (they didn’t), and of course their nearly direct descendants The Sex Pistols told everyone there was “no future” so they could sell as