Nas's Illmatic by Matthew Gasteier Page B

something you are advocating it. Nas certainly avoids condemning his surroundings or the lifestyle he leads on the record, but he hardly advocates it either, and here is asking for a brighter day. On “The World Is Yours,” he certainly desires change, and though there is a certain level of irony in taking your rallying cry from a character in a movie that is killed in the end, the basic sentiment is more conscious hip hop than gangsta rap. “You wanna get it but you ain’t doin’ nothin’ but sittin’ there,” Nas says on a promotional video for the album. “You gotta get up and get yours, ‘cause it’s yours, you know what I mean?”
    Yet Nas doesn’t seem to strive for anything here beyond the basic needs of survival. Though it is mostly physical survival he is concerned with, economic survival is close behind, andthough he questions it at the beginning of “Life’s a Bitch,” Nas certainly believes cash rules everything around him. Even on that song he asserts “it’s all about cash in abundance.” He flirts with drug dealing because “loose cracks produce stacks” and “Nowadays I need the green in a flash just like the next man.” Still he turns to his natural talent to save him, because “a crime couldn’t beat a rhyme.” Money is important to Nas, but his ultimate faith returns to himself. “Rhymes’ll make me richer than a slipper made Cinderella,” he correctly predicts on “One Time 4 Your Mind.” As long as you have faith in yourself, the rest will come naturally.
    Though he would eventually dip into “rings fronted with stones,” Nas is more concerned about making money than flaunting it on his debut. But the root of the drive to consume that hip hop finds itself stuck with today stems from much of the same belief system Nas espouses here. Capitalism and commercialism rule hip hop, because hip hop is fundamentally about the American Dream. Chasing it. Pointing out its inconsistencies. Being shut out of it: Nas points this out quite literally when, in his 2003 video for “I Can,” a simple and refreshing song directed at the Black youth, he wears a shirt that says “I am the American Dream.”
    The pursuit of truth in the face of myth dominates underground hip hop just as strongly as it does mainstream rappers who “make it rain” and make proud appearances on MTV’s
Cribs
. The image of the star rapper is the image of the cowboy, forging his Own path, crossing the law when the law needs to be crossed, living by his own set of rules. Nas, like his West Coast contemporary Tupac, plays with this persona as often as he embodies it. But unlike Tupac, who was raised by a former Black Panther and enjoyed a relatively safe childhood, Nas has the authenticity of despair to make his story ring true. Tupac’s contradictions often seemed like calculated positioning, withneither side revealing the true artist. Nas is able to seem like he believes in both alternatives, because they exist around him. There are many paths laid out on
Illmatic
, and each one for Nas makes up a parallel universe—“rich or doing years in the hundreds,” “havin’ dreams that I’m a gangsta…But just a nigga walking with his finger on the trigger.” He asks and answers the authenticity question: “Check the prognosis, is it real or showbiz?/My window faces shootouts, drug overdoses/Live amongst no roses, only the drama, for real.”
    And still, Nas is left with just his own knowledge and an ingrained desire to make a better life. In the end, the most powerful statements of faith on
Illmatic
might come from the two earliest songs: “Halftime” and “It Ain’t Hard to Tell.” Here is where Nas takes a simple beat, ignores song construction, and simply spits his rhymes. These two songs aren’t about anything but Nas and his innate ability. He dominates break loops. He’s an ace when he faces the bass. He sets it off with his own rhyme. It’s clear that any artist who would rely so much on his own