13. NasIllmatic

Nas takes me back to that B-boy thing again – the street storytelling. Not only that, but it had DJ Premier on there, it had Q-Tip on there, Large Professor, Pete Rock… [exhales] Even now I don’t know how to deal with that album. You know when you capture a moment in music? This album is that. Again we have another artist coming from the hip-hop field, but coming from somewhere completely different to anybody else. Not just his style, but the way he captured the essence of what hip-hop is to me, what the street is. The intellectualism that Nas brought – from a political angle, he was next level. It’s got everything. And… Large Professor. Pete Rock. Q-Tip. Premier. [laughs] But it’s a Nas album – it’s not like the way it went after when everybody had to get a featured artist on their record. This was totally done for the music and you can hear it. Their names aren’t plastered all over it. I look forward to the day that someone can do that again; deliver an album in that way. It feels so true to me.