I haven't written about Hip-Hop on here before, so I may as well jump in with possibly the best Hip-Hop album of all time, Nas' Illmatic.
I checked it out a couple of weeks ago and my mind was blown. From beginning to end it's full of top notch production and rapping mastery. Nas paints a lyrical picture of his everyday reality (up until that point), mixed with the standard rapping boasts, with such dexterity that I had to listen to every song a couple of times to take it all in. His flow reminds me of Rakim's, but it manages to sound much more natural and poetic, which is saying something. What's really interesting lyrically is the bitter-sweet way he looks at ghetto gangsta life: never glorifying it, but also never smugly denying that there's something to glorify.
I'm kinda running out of things to write because the bottom line is: Illmatic is an amazing album that every Hip-Hop fan should hear, and my relatively uneducated blabbering doesn't really do it justice.
Some tracks:
I checked it out a couple of weeks ago and my mind was blown. From beginning to end it's full of top notch production and rapping mastery. Nas paints a lyrical picture of his everyday reality (up until that point), mixed with the standard rapping boasts, with such dexterity that I had to listen to every song a couple of times to take it all in. His flow reminds me of Rakim's, but it manages to sound much more natural and poetic, which is saying something. What's really interesting lyrically is the bitter-sweet way he looks at ghetto gangsta life: never glorifying it, but also never smugly denying that there's something to glorify.
I'm kinda running out of things to write because the bottom line is: Illmatic is an amazing album that every Hip-Hop fan should hear, and my relatively uneducated blabbering doesn't really do it justice.
Some tracks:
No comments:
Post a Comment