The World According To NAS

Celebrating 25 years of one of rap’s most seminal albums, Illmatic

- Lindsay Pereira

Sushmita Sen and Aishwarya Rai loomed large in India’s consciousness back in the summer of 1994. The former was crowned Miss Universe that year, while the latter took home the title of Miss World. For me, both events faded in comparison to the suicide of Kurt Cobain, lead singer of Nirvana, whose passing shook me like the death of someone particularly close. This doesn’t make sense now, in hindsight, but felt normal at the time because, as teenagers, we tend to give our heroes a lot more importance than our family members.

A lot of us back then, a captive audience in the dawn of satellite television after economic liberalisation finally came to India, seemed to have singers, musicians and bands as personal heroes. Movie stars from Hollywood were as big as they are today, but we couldn’t track their lives on an hourly basis the way Instagram now encourages us to. Instead, some of us used our free time to minutely pore over albums and try to make sense of individual songs in a manner that short attention spans have now rendered obsolete.

In April that year, the American rapper Nas (presumably shortened because Nasir bin Olu Dara Jones wouldn’t fit on cassette covers) dropped his debut studio album, Illmatic. It was introduced on MTV India via a music video for the last track, “It Ain’t Hard To Tell”, and promptly dropped out of heavy rotation a few weeks later. There were bigger releases and events occupying MTV’s attention at the time, given that Roxette had released Crash! Boom! Bang!, rapper Warren G had made a bigger splash with his debut Regulate...G Funk Era, Blur had effectively kicked offBritpop with Parklife, Green Day had turned into stars overnight with Dookie and Michael Jackson had married Lisa Marie Presley.