Queens, NY · hip-hop

Nas

1 upcoming festival

Illmatic. That's it, that's the blurb — QB's finest in career-renaissance form, with a late-era run most rappers would kill for as a peak.

Nas, born Nasir Jones, grew up in the Queensbridge Houses in Long Island City and made his name as a teenager with a guest verse on Main Source's Live at the Barbeque. His 1994 debut Illmatic, built with producers including DJ Premier, Pete Rock, Q-Tip and Large Professor, is routinely ranked among the most influential rap albums ever made, and its dense, novelistic writing set a template for East Coast lyricism.

The commercial follow-up It Was Written, the Jay-Z rivalry that produced Ether, and Stillmatic all shaped the decades that followed. In the 2020s he began a sustained run of albums produced entirely by Hit-Boy, the first of which won a Grammy for Best Rap Album.

hip-hop