Kyle: Today we’re talking about Illmatic by nas.

Cliff: In our pre-discussion leading up to hitting the record button, we were just using the nineties to triangulate ourselves. And our keystone cultural monument for that was Atlanta Braves trivia year by year, very specifically, probably because me and you can most easily associate that with our exact moments in childhood and where we were during all of them.

I can always work backwards from the 96 demolition or the demolition after the 96 season of Atlanta, Fulton County Stadium. And I still in my life have driven by that parking lot, sadly, for many years since then. But it’s fun to think through what I was doing when Illmatic arrived and try to place anything around myself, especially, having been both my whole life now.

A white kid. I was, and still am one of those, but also lived in Jonesboro at this time. And I was at that point, an old enough kid to have friends who did know about nas, even if I was not one of them very well yet. And what a strange time to be alive, think about and recollect on. but this album has come back and blown me away in a way that even I didn’t anticipate knowing full well it would blow me away again.

I have been stoked about this for, what, six weeks now.

Kyle: So a couple of things. One, I find it funny that we’re we’re just now deep enough in this practice together to take on two of the biggest baddest, uh, of their respective thing. Like we’re doing Illmatic and the first Sabbath record in the same year. And, and that feels deeply spiritually related to me.

we’ve danced around the big ones in our conversations I think we told ourselves that it was to force ourselves out, but there are so many records that there’s so much on, and it’s so just, there aren’t a lot of records that I think it’s as settled that like, okay, this is the one of its thing as much as you’re gonna find, uh, with matic. So I think our attitude for a long time was like, what’s the point? What can we add to it? And it’s like, oh, no. Well, actually it is interesting for us to think about it. The other thing that I wanted to say is it is funny that we went to the Atlanta Braves without consciously connecting it to the fact that they were so America’s team.

And so in the monoculture to some degree that they are name checked on Illmatic, on halftime, on the first single from this record that came out in 92 in the middle of the best team in baseball histories, meteoric Run Atlanta Ain’t braver. I pull a number, like a pager and it was a gazillion listens. it just goes to show how bad I am at Deep Listening as an instinct.

It was a gazillion listens before I was like, did he say Atlanta? And I was like, yep. Yeah, sure Was. on the soundtrack to the movie Zebra Head, which I put on my letterbox watch list and then saw what it was about, read some reviews, saw Michael Rappaport was in the cast, and immediately removed it from my letterbox watch list.

But that still brings us back to Illmatic. I think it’s no secret on this podcast that we are two white guys, but we are also two enormous lovers and respecters of hip hop. And this is just one of those moments, like, if you love music, hip hop or otherwise is worth really taking a look at this. Uh, the first thing that I want to know, I intentionally did not ask you ahead of time is you alluded to it just now, but I’d, I’d like you to tell me more about your relationship to this record.

When you were exposed to it, when you did or did not start claiming it as your own, as something you loved. ‘ cause we’re, we’re southerners and sort of as a default mode there. There’s a bright line between us and East coast rap. So tell me about your relationship to Illmatic. Let’s situate ourselves.

Cliff: Totally. Oh, this is, this is really cool. Honestly, something I hadn’t even really thought about until this moment. That’s a great prompt. I’d only thought about the sort of lead in to my answer, which is spending a lot of time with this record. I now do truly realize that growing up, going to, at that time elementary school in Clayton County, like I absolutely heard this record.

I didn’t know it or care about it at that time for a ton of reasons. I also just didn’t have the appropriate exposure to appreciate hip hop in general at that moment. But like the, the further I go into it, the more I’ve listened, it’s, and we’ve made this reference before too, but it’s, it’s everything from what my friends might have listened to in the neighborhood to songs.

I remember hearing at like a dazzle skating rink. cause it, I mean, I think we talked about that on like, uh, the TLC episode, but, where I grew up, NAS would not have been uncommon whatsoever in that setting. And so like, so I’m starting to kind of remember a bunch of that. But the actual moment that this began happening for me as a kid or as a, I guess as an adult, literally, and exactly three days after I graduated high school, I moved to New York.

At which

Kyle: I was wondering if that was gonna factor into it. Yeah.

Cliff: Yes.

Oh man.

Kyle: uh, this would’ve been 11 years after the record came out that’s right.

a, still a cultural touchstone.

Cliff: Yeah. And I remember luckily this, body of work in this podcast, uh, has enough sort of evidence for work when I’m about to say that. You can always go back if you’re interested, but I mean, naturally at that time, like there was a hip hop artist who you would think of as the person representing New York in 2005, and that was Jay-Z.

And I don’t give a shit about Jay-Z. So that was a hard thing for me to try to process like

Kyle: What era

Cliff: in insincerity

Kyle: Would that have been that? Not the Black album. We’re well beyond that. Like American gangster maybe by that point.

Cliff: Yeah, something like that. Shortly past collision course, which we

Kyle: Oh God. Yeah. And um, like Blueprint. Yeah. We’re, yeah, we’re well into all of Bad Boys too. Soundtrack. Yeah. I don’t know.

Cliff: yeah. So, as whatever as I was at 18, like we both were I had enough self-awareness to be like, okay, you don’t have to like everything, but it’s probably helpful to understand it.

And I became, you know, like really fascinated with New York culture living there. I mean, I lived in Hell’s Kitchen. I lived in a tiny apartment. I literally moved in with someone I’d never met until I got there. I was spending crazy amounts of money just surviving in a rat infested apartment.

I was walking like, and, and you just have that experience, right, of, you’re inside the apartment and it’s never quiet anywhere, but you’re inside the apartment and you’re in, and then you’re out in New York, it’s just one of the two things. You’re either like sleeping or you are in New York.

And so that sensation of hitting, hitting the door every morning at the, at the exit of your apartment building and just hearing the street in one sense, that whole cultural experience became like a really meaningful thing to me. And so Nas became a part of that. two things that have probably never been associated with each other before Seinfeld was a part of that.

just the what is going on here because this is so different from where I grew up and like, what are, like, everyone has this like, layer of conversation where they’re just talking about New York and I didn’t know anything about it. And so it just, it made, it was a really deeply fascinating time.

It was also, you know, right then at 60 Gig iPod color time where you’re buying a thing from Tower Records or whatever, spending 30 bucks a fucking cd, bringing it back on your MacBook, ripping that thing down so that you could put it on your iPod. ’cause there’s no meaningful way to just buy that shit directly and put it on there.

And like, yes, file sharing had spun up, but I was living in a, what a relic. I was living in a New York apartment. There’s always such good wifi you can get at that time. Like it’s kind of different than being able to sit at home on your parents’ computer. So all of that was kind of swirling when I learned to go down a few distinct paths.

And one of them was this, but it, it was like pearls before swine, to be honest with you. Like I’m listening to it. I hear it. I’ve got my good headphones. I’m into it. I’m walking the New York streets. I’ve got everything that I should need to understand what was happening. But the, I mean, and maybe this is obvious, but I could not immediately understand where a Nas autobiographical album was coming from.

You know, not least because I wasn’t literally living in Queens at the time. But like, that was not my childhood up until this point. And at that moment I’m listening to someone, and I’m sure we’ll talk about this more, but I’m listening to someone effectively give a life history up until the age of 18, uh, about living right there.

And that’s, a lot to try to unpack. but you know, another probably adjacent part of this, we’ll talk about more. It’s like he is throwing so much information at you per second that for me, it was overwhelming. And all I walked away with, at least at that time, was listening to this record is fucking cool.

And that’s probably all I need to know about it at this point. I’m gonna listen to it if anyone asks me if I like it. Yes. What’s your favorite NAS record? This one specifically. I like some of the other ones, but Illmatic specifically, I like it. You like it? Everyone likes it. it was a home run reference of all types.

I, so I’ve kind of had a few different phases of it. but not to overstate the entire purpose of everything we do on this podcast over and over again, but man, I appreciated going back and intentionally going way deep with a skillset that I didn’t know to have at that time.

Kyle: I love that.

Cliff: Mine was simple, but narratively reasonable. I’m betting that you had a much cooler first, second, third exposure to this record and had thoughts about it as much like long term, as long as I’ve known you a bigger and more intelligent hip hop head. So I’m, I’m curious to hear sort of the same from you.

Kyle: Yeah, so actually not at all, and it’s a bit of a source of a bit of a source of shame, that I was so staunchly a proud southern rap evangelist that I was like, fuck everything from New York. it was the Hank Williams Jr. Send me to Hell or New York City. It’d be about the same to me. And I had never, I didn’t go to New York until my twenties for the first time.

it’s crazy considering how much time I spend there now. but the only artist that I got into from New York, like Jay-Z was, w was because they were trafficked to me by people from other places. I liked the Jay-Z that did stuff with Timbaland or the Neptunes, you know, people whose sounds made more sense to me.

I mean, it just started with the sonic palette of New York Boomba music. Jazzy mid range, whatever. We have talked a number of times Project Pat, episode and otherwise about car culture and its influence on the funky low end syrupy sound. The eight oh eights the stuff that I love. so as a bit of a point of pride, I didn’t listen to Nas, I didn’t listen to Biggie. I didn’t listen to Mob Deep. I didn’t listen to stuff that was like consciously, proudly from New York. I had 95 source awards burned into my brain and I watched outcasts get booed and was like, you know what?

I don’t need you either. so I was like pretty deep into my twenties, I think before I was like, that was ill-informed. Informed and I should listen to this. And to your point, I had had scores of years and hours of hip hop listening and like sort of a more, more informed opinion of what I liked, didn’t like what I think I could like.

I’ll be honest, it was really the blog era. It was like, action Bronson and ASAP Rocky and Dudes like that, where people were like, this just sounds like Ghostface, or this sounds like Nas. Or this person’s trying to be Rakim. And I was like, well damn, I guess I should go. I like these mix tapes. I guess I should go listen to all of that.

It was really, I think the Alchemist more than anything where they were like, if you like Alchemist beats, you should be listening to New York shit and you’re an idiot if you don’t So I had an enoughs enough moment and I was, living and working in downtown Atlanta, like sort of one of the only walkable experiences to have in that city at the time and put it in the headphones as you would in a New York way.

And I think you have to be out walking around in a city with some density, with some noise that it’s competing with. Like you, you told me a lot before this episode about try different ways, different forums for listening. but I remember walking around with a full blast, like caffeinated, first thing in the morning, feet to the pavement.

I love what you said about like either you’re sleeping or you’re out. New York, New York state of mind. Like when the first notes of that shit hit, it is straight outta the dungeons of rap. You’re like, I’m in a place, my character spawned in the middle of the GTA map and I’m here, and the the fucking piano notes are, you know, and it only took one solid listen through that.

I was like, this is the greatest. This is the rap record. This is If aliens came down today, I’m the biggest outcast defender in the history of the universe. Illmatic is the singular hip hop record. And I, would defy anyone to make an argument for it being anything else because a lot of the stuff that people would point to, including Biggie or Pac Points directly back to this shit.

and it’s so interesting. It’s the, it’s the crux moment. The first cycle of hip hop kind of draws to a close. And this is a new world being born in 94. He’s grabbing the torch from Rakim and running straight past all the early nineties shit, you know, vanilla Ice and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to the Chronic from 92.

whatever LL Cool J was doing, starting to be an actor, all the pop. The sort of first wave of ification, like kids, if you don’t like the way hip hop is represented in popular culture now after the sort of early two thousands era, you would’ve hated the uneasy culture clash of Rodney King’s early nineties America, where nobody had really figured out how to sit in the same room and listen to this shit yet.

And it, it brought a lot of that stuff back viscerally for me. But, I became a fan of it just as a fan of hip hop. And I am also, you and I have talked, I think, a number of times on this podcast about the sweet spot for runtime. This is like 39, 39, 40 minutes. it could not be more perfect runtime.

And then to your point, you can skate over the surface of this record forever and ever. Just on, the way these beats hit and the movement, the lyrical of his rhyme, especially his interior rhyme, it keeps you in motion the whole time. But like you said, it’s fucking dense. Like thi this is a, there’s a hundred grams of protein in this record.

full bore. so yeah, you were way ahead of me on this one. take that w

Cliff: I will. Because they come so rarely. I’m realizing though, this man, this is so cool. Us talking about, this reminded me of a really specific moment I had this, perhaps this was one of the genesis of, uh, cliff needs to have a ready defense for every musical position that’s ever happened. When the reason I moved to New York is I was working with effectively like a nonprofit who helped.

artists, for lack of a better term. So working musicians, actors, whatever else in New York. The idea was to bring them together find ways to support what they were doing, put them in community together, get them work basically by sharing that and all that in, in building support networks and stuff.

Now I’ve shared on some episode somewhere I am pretty sure I’m gonna tell an adjacent story to set up. One of the things that happened during that short period of time where I lived in New York by myself, is someone who knew me through that nonprofit said, you know, you, you’ve been playing guitar, you’re trying to go to, you know, music.

Like, do you know that Les Paul plays down the street? Like Les Paul, the person. And I was like, what the fuck are you talking about? You know? And they’re like, no, no, no. Like 96-year-old Les Paul plays at this jazz club down there. three nights a week or whatever. so extremely long story short, like that conversation went, yeah, but I cannot afford to go.

And he said, you know what I like, I can’t really afford this either, but we are going and I’m paying for you. And he like, fronted $150 cover charge or whatever it was to get me in the door of this jazz club and sit and see literally the last Paul play. Almost wordlessly because of how far his mind had gone.

Like playing the guitar in a way that I’ve never seen anyone play before with 90 something year old hands. And it was like a deeply incredible experience. But living there and working with, and, and living with like true musicians and artists who are trying to make a living. Like I met people who were like, no, no, no.

I care about this and if you don’t know about it, I want to teach you, not judge you. So, like that was one experience I had. But having this conversation and talking about New York reminds me that at one of those gatherings, someone met me, asked me where I was from. Although it was pretty obvious at the time ’cause I looked like a fucking almond brother to a T man.

I mean, I had long, long-ish growing hair, right? Like, I just, so I looked like someone picked me up from the south and dropped me off

Kyle: Sleeve, sleeveless shirts, reefer, smell, and looking for sweet tea anywhere you could get it.

Cliff: In an incredible bit of trivia about me, this is pre reef or smell, but

Kyle: Oh, that’s right.

I always forget that, that’s, I forget that. That’s my fault that that happened. Unlike so many other things in life, cliff, you took something that we were both into and you got to be the best one at it immediately.

Cliff: I take it seriously, you know, so boy being, I, I remember now I was, at something, a meeting something else with one of these folks. Someone, someone, you know, met me, found out where I was from. We talked about outcast pretty quickly, and they were like, tight, so how much are you listen to Born to Die? And I was like, well, I mean, I like know about it. And they’re like, no, no, no. Do you know that record? I’m like, no. Cool. Stay here. They just went back to their apartment and got that CD and brought it back to me and said, you should listen to this for a while and come back and talk to me about it. tell me what you think. It’s not like a test, right? It was just like, no, no, no, you should know about this. You just came to New York. And so, like, just even that moment, right? I, I didn’t have the context to care about that then. But now sitting here thinking about it and talking to you about it and thinking about like what are the two, like monumental cultural to touchstones that came out in 1994, specifically like building up East Coast rap, talking about the importance of New York.

All of this stuff, like that was a cultural moment that someone was sharing with us. That would have been the same as us finding somebody who came from somewhere else and going, this is Aquemini and I need for you to listen to it. And I like, I need for you to tell me. What this means to you after you do it for a while.

Ideally put it on in a car and drive around aimlessly for a while. Which is certainly not the New York experience, but man, like, even just bringing that to mind right, gives me a deeper appreciation for how meaningful this clearly was. Not only to people like Illmatic specifically, but like this moment and that decade plus of like, yeah, we showed up artistically.

This is what we mean. And like we sort of categorize ourselves like it’s sort of like Mets and Yankees fans a little bit, but like, we won’t hate each other, but we will sh maybe shoot each other lightly over disagree because it’s really important. And just like having that level of appreciation when, from our experience, even at that point, loving any part of southern rap still meant that we didn’t necessarily have some sort of natural enemy in the same way that there was the east and west coast.

It was just, closer to what you said, which is kind of, um, well fuck you guys entirely. We have a whole thing over here.

Kyle: right. But that reminds me of one of the things that I love at an instinctual level about hip hop is I don’t think there’s any other art form kind of in general, but especially in music, that when people talk about, like the culture in hip hop, you know, our, our buddy Brandon Butler from butter a TL says, culture is people like us do things like this.

Just being able to point to something and say, that’s where I’m from, that’s what it’s like to be me. I am proud. You know, or I have a multitude of feelings about seeing it put out there. Like, I recognize these streets, I recognize these restaurants that they talk about. It’s just, it’s real. it captures the beauty and the ugliness of my lived experience as well.

And I, I stringently want to avoid some of the stuff that. We have read in preparation for this, like I hate over intellectualizing hip hop. It goes without saying, maybe it doesn’t, that it’s a very important art form. It is sort of like the dominant mode of expression across the world. Now, you can never talk about or appreciate hip hop enough, but like when shit starts to read too much, like a PhD dissertation about it, people glaze over.

That’s not why people start listening to hip hop because it’s important. You sent a gif of the Juneteenth episode of Atlanta, uh, where Craig is trying to explain all the shit to earn. And I, like, I remember cringing straight up from my tailbone and my head going through the ceiling, seeing that character.

Like, that’s exactly what I don’t want to be as a lover of hip hop and a person who is in and around black culture for most of his life, that’s my deep, that’s my deepest fear. by the same token, I love hip hop because you can have so many conversations. Around it.

It opens up so many dimensions, you know, from the low street to the high street. Like everybody, everybody can get into this. And that’s especially funny to me as somebody who grew up in the kind of small town southern Christian environment where we did, you know, tipper Gore’s, PMRC land, where like parents wouldn’t let their kids buy CDs ’cause of the stickers they had on it.

And then they saw the videos on MTV with the women and the champagne and all that and they were like, well, definitely not now, but everybody recognizes, everybody sees themself in it for better and for worse. And everything that you just said about your experience as a New Yorker, I love, ’cause you were very far from the Queensbridge housing projects, physically and spiritually, but you can also get it, and I think the two books that I, I read through for this and that, and that we have kind of talked about were the, Michael Eric Dyson curated book, born to Use, mike’s that’s got, you know, dream Hampton and a bunch of great people sharing, frankly, a little bit too intellectualized essays on different dimensions of what this music means, using it as what they called a cipher.

and then the 33 and a third by Matthew Gasier, who made the Fu Penguin blog. And that particular guy having the 33 and a third entry on this album makes me feel some type of way, which I know is rich as we’re too white gas and talking about this thing. But he, he acknowledged it right in the forward.

Anyway, all that to say, they both talk about duality, like that comes up a lot. one of the first things that I noticed was that life’s a bitch and the world is yours, are right next to each other on the track list. And that’s like the philosophical yin and yang. That’s like the linchpin of this whole thing to me.

But also you’re New York and NAZA’s New York are a million miles away, and they’re the same thing, right? It’s a hyper-specific experience. It’s extremely detailed. He’s bragging, but he is also street reporting. He has ambition, but he also has fears or, you know, just real world survival motivators. we talked about that phrase, you know, it, it’s all in there with Jeff Buckley.

But like that duality of man thing is so here, and that’s what makes it such a brilliant document. And this motherfucker was 20 years old when this thing came out. Have to talk, you have like, that immediately elevates it to LeBron James type type vibes, savant, born to do it. And all the collab, the very famous esteemed collaborators who swooped in to help on this record was because they wanted to be.

And there are quotes from people like DJ Premier in large professor who said like, yo, this kid was the one. we just knew there was just equality there. I hope it’s evident as soon as you drop the needle on this, I think it is for both of us.

Cliff: To immediately go straight into what you just said. ’cause that is, to me, the connection point for everyone who’s listening, right? despite what you might mentally think about the difference between 20-year-old NAS and you person, somehow he crosses all of those gaps. what’s most maybe incredible and interesting about it is that there are a million specific reasons.

We’ll talk through why all of this is very good, every detail of it. But there was never a top line intention of like, Hey, I’d like to connect to a Midwestern white 30-year-old. or a native Hawaiian or somebody who lives in Canada or like just there is somehow a everything and everybody ness about his human experience and the way that he tells it and the way that he cares.

That translates somehow it like against all odds. And I think what you said about life’s a bitch and the world is yours being smacked up against each other is like the Rosetta Stone of whatever is

happening there. There, there is a, a true optimism in this music that comes from stories that otherwise would lack optimism.

You would think like, and it man, especially in this moment, in 2026, going back and listening to a truly positive Hey everybody, go do your fucking thing, man. We love you. Like you rule, you’re supported. Holy shit, man. Like it’s bordering on like a cancelable offense in modern times to be this like vulnerable and supportive of people, especially on a record that has other, cool artifacts from the nineties, such as the use of the F word, which we no longer do, and yet E I’m bringing that out even because I in no way need to or want to defend the use of that term anymore.

But what I will say is if you go back and look at exactly how he uses it, it’s a lot less derogatory than it feels like on first glance. He’s kind of using it as a specific way to not judge it, but instead illustrate a larger point like. it’s masterful in a way that you don’t know how to expect until you turn that notch on your brain and go, oh, I need to understand what this 20-year-old was doing along with this dream team of producers, because they have like a Wilt Chamberlain esque rookie season.

Like a fucking outrageous, I just came outta nowhere and I’m going to not only show you what hip hop album should sound like in general, but I’m gonna tell you what you should do as a new hip hop artist on your very first record, or else you risk immediately melting into obscurity, oh, challenge fucking accepted.

Okay. And to be able to go back still, this far in advance and go, holy shit, this whole thing holds up. It sounds good. It feels good. It’s interesting. It’s fascinating. It’s good active, listen, it’s good passive. Listen, it connects directly to history, and it connects directly to all the future that would come past it.

I mean, we always position albums as a, hopefully more of a constellation or nexus point or whatever for learning things. But I mean, this arguably is like in the pantheon of like, there are 20 things that have been very important in American musical history, and this maybe belongs in that room.

Kyle: I saw it compared to kind of blue. I read in one of the essays that the use of wild style was an acknowledgement, you know, wild style is to hip hop as Charlie Parker’s Cherokee was to bebop. So the, the indication of jazz and this records relationship to jazz is, is obviously super, super important.

I saw comparisons to Big Mama Thornton and Elvis. I saw somebody compare Rakim to Woody Guthrie and Nas to Bob Dylan. That so many different people could arrive at the same conclusion. Oh, this is perhaps the most innately American record that has ever existed is pretty insane.

Because I think if you ask that question straight up, free of context, I would actually be quite interested in, America is an experiment. anyone around the world can see. It’s an experiment that’s not going very well right now. The lab’s on fire, but it’s 250 years old. I mean, it’s been a blink.

We’ve barely put a drop in the beaker in the grand scheme of the experiment. so naturally there’s gonna be a little bit of a toxic cloud in the lab, but that we already have like a super serum, like Illmatic or like rock and roll or like Miles Davis, let alone all those things is pretty fucking crazy.

I would be interested actually to listen to an AM America at two 50 podcast where we just asked 250 famous people. What’s the most American thing? Album specifically, but also like food. I might start doing that as an icebreaker next time I’m in Denver. I’ll be very interested. Wonder how many people will say the Grateful Dead.

Cliff: In Colorado as many people as you ask, probably

Kyle: live in Europe. 72. A record, not even a record, not even made in America.

Cliff: Listen man, we’re a kaleidoscope these days. I would know how to take someone’s dead appreciation and go, you know what, man? I can appreciate that. They helped further live recordings and passing music around to each other and creating a culture of music being liberated from its packaging and capitalism.

And I can appreciate that that culture stands today and in some distant way helped and influenced and supported hip hop and what it would become with all of its sampling and moving things back and forth. So, find the connection challenge always kept sharp by my constant ability

Kyle: I was telling somebody just the other day about your, you can’t make me hate this idea. Where for the listeners, the idea that we had been batting around is like, if Tig the podcast ever tried to do a live event, what would that even be? That wasn’t stupid and something that we both hated. Like what?

What is something that we would actually both go to, that’s a quote unquote podcast event. You had that idea of sitting at the, at the table, like, the change my mind guy. it’s, but it’s, you can’t make me hate this no matter what it is. I gotta say, you make me really mad with your ability to win the game. Always. yet another thing. Maybe that’s the theme of this podcast, yet another thing that you’re fucking better than me at.

Cliff: It’s, it’s this or die through becoming an angry bar. Like just, just becoming an angry ball of frustration all the time about everything. I don’t like anything and everything’s getting worse. Okay, how can that be true for me? And find a way out of it at the same time, this is my best idea, but we will still hold this idea because I still think it would be hilarious.

And I would in fact accept this challenge to

Kyle: Yeah. If anybody’s listening and wants to sponsor that, let us know. we’ll do it. we’ll make a night of it. we’ll do it in New York, Na or Jones, New York.

Cliff: I would love

Kyle: I would love that too.

Cliff: to that end, like, so starting to swing more into, into some more details about the album, and perhaps we’ll come back to this, but one of the touchstone like documents about this thing is the source review, right? The, the five Mike’s source review of Illmatic and

Kyle: five mics and perfect. 10 on Pitchfork. Name one other thing that has that.

Cliff: Yes. In a top line sense, like, yes, everybody thought it was good and still thinks it’s good. Yeah. Cool. Alright, that’s helpful. But like even the review itself from the source has this energy about what we’re talking about that I still think you can pull out today. And there were two bits that I wanted to draw out of that review specifically that I think can move us into more about the music and all that.

But just really impressing upon anyone who’s listening to this right now who’s in the position of, oh, I could appreciate this record more. Alright, dig the fuck in. Like this rules, it will pay off. Here are some things that people really said at the time, first of all, I think this duality from just one sentence in the review helps contextualize a lot of this even for somebody like me.

Quote your mind races to keep up with NA’s lyricism while your body dips to the beat. Like we sort of talked about this phenomenon with Funkadelic. And, there is this ability for your intellect, for your ID and your ego to like dance together this whole record. Like you don’t have to choose one over the other.

They, they work in perfect harmony to the degree that it’s upsetting and makes you realize that you rarely occupy this balance in your life

Kyle: It’s thrilling. Yeah.

Cliff: it’s thrilling is a great way to put it. So, so then to that end a little bit of a spoiler, but like the last part of that review from Source says quote, the bottom line is this, even if the album doesn’t speak to you on that personal level, the music itself is still well worth the money.

If you can’t at least appreciate the value of NA’s poetical realism, then you best get yourself up outta hip hop. Keep it real baby. like even that isn’t insulting energy. It’s like there’s no room for anything that’s different than this. This is the thing, it’s being real and it’s feeling good.

And it’s those two things together and that’s what our life is about and culture and art and like to be able to talk about a record that it not only was anticipated and appreciated, but then still now in reverse has the same amount of. Cultural impact and appreciation is rare. Even some of the standout records that we have talked about that are just like monumentally changing of culture, were albums that had to come to be appreciated over time.

And in some cases were like panned at the moment, you know, with, with one of our favorite large examples, constantly being Led Zeppelin, people didn’t fucking like Led Zeppelin back then. There’s people who still don’t like ’em now, but like the appreciation came over time and this one is like, no dude.

Everyone saw it. Moment one just, oh shit, this rules. And to be able to read those comments and writings from people in the mid nineties and then now to go back with every tool that we have and all the detail we’ll spend from here on out to be able to go back just moment by moment, detail by detail, and still go, man, this thing is dense.

Everything I pick out of it is incredible. It’s interesting. It sends me in another direction. even if we’re just talking about the lyrics, you know, I’m not a huge fan of lyrics. You can’t really get around them in hip hop though. Like for me, this record alone is like. Watching an episode of Xavier Renegade Angel, I like watch 20 seconds and then have to rewind 10 seconds and then watch 20 and then rewind 10 against like, what the fuck did he just say?

That was crazy. Whoa. your brain can’t even unpack stuff as fast as he’s rolling it out to you. Even if you understand all the references. Just so you know, that’s probably all the building up we necessarily need to do, but like it is really blown me away how consistent the appreciation for this record in particular has been and continues

Kyle: I will say though, as a point of nuance, it didn’t go gold for two years. It sold 300 th 330,000 copies in its first year, which is a lot. But to your point, prime CD time, you know, Nirvana’s and utero came out the same year. so three 30 is a lot, but not the most. so it didn’t go gold for two years, and it took nearly 10 years to go platinum.

It was highly anticipated. In New York and in the hip hop head community. And in fact, they discovered something to the order of like 60,000 bootleg copies of it somewhere, like in a warehouse in boxes. so it was hotly anticipated because of the buildup of a couple of years for Nas, since live at the Barbecue is first on live at the barbecue, which is like kind of a crazy origin story.

and in the community of people, like I really wanna make the distinction that hip hop was not the prevalent cultural form in America at the time. So to say the hip hop community loved it did not mean the same thing at all in 1994, that it does now. Right? It also means that’s why we have a harder time agreeing outside of maybe Kendrick on what the greatest thing of the moment is.

but the wider world took a while to catch up to nas. And by the time that they did, by the time that rap became sort of the dominant pop music form, by 99 2000, we were back on that sort of 92, 93 indulgent type of, like big timers, ludicrous. Nelly pop rap stuff and Nas was himself riding different waves by that point.

So there is a, a bit of, and maybe this is my bias as somebody that was late to the party, I think there is a bit of like, if, you know, you know that happened, other people, smarter people definitely really knew, but it’s not a foregone conclusion. I want to stress that as to anyone who thinks they’re behind the party on this or has written it off as like, yep, I get it, but I don’t really care.

There’s never a bad time to catch up on Illmatic. And this goes in the small Pantheon with Jeff Buckley’s Grace, another 1994 record. I don’t know what the fuck was in the water, man. but Illmatic is one of those. You gotta do it. You got it. Got it. Gotta do it. So once you do it, cliff, what do you notice?

What are your impressions? I think we’ve, we’ve started to wade into that, what’s the first listen, jump out at you stuff then, or

Cliff: Okay. I totally, I want to use some specific tracks here, but a few things. One, I already mentioned the sort of lyrical density of the whole thing. This is like a genius.com ass record that existed a long time before genius.com. Did I have found myself spending an increasing amount of time just like, oh, oh, oh, that’s cool.

I thought I got that reference and there were three more references packed in there that I had no idea about. ’cause I’m not supposed to know them. And now I do. O one was just the, the true sense of time shift that’s happened culturally between then and now and recognizing that this was a record that would have been incredibly perfect for the internet era that existed well before any of that, you know, really became what we know it as today, where a bunch of people who love a thing in, in, ideally in ideal circumstances, a bunch of people who love a thing can come together and appreciate it together.

And then also compete with one another for who cares about it the most and knows all of the details. so. Having that bit of dissonance and appreciation even for like, oh, cool, I get to go back. I get to experience Illmatic with all of the benefit of like human history being uploaded to data centers.

This is cool. I have this real, I’m at like, I’m on the King Kong ride at Universal, but like the King Kong thing is actually happening outside right now. And I get to like watch what’s happening instead of it being like a video of a thing and just the whole thing had this really cool feeling to it to the degree that I think, uh, described to you that like listening to it at all, especially on repeat, like we have for however many weeks now, just feels like private aura farming.

I feel myself becoming cooler listening to this over and over and over again. And inside of those, this period of time where I’ve been focused on this record, I’ve brought it up to people to like different types of people just to, just out of raw curiosity for like, did this ever enter into your cultural Venn diagram?

I could not describe how differently different people have been who were like, oh, Illmatic, yeah. Hell yeah, dude. Hell yeah. Love that thing. Right? And just like I would even just say Nas and they would just, yeah, like Illmatic, like, yes. Okay. so there was this cool sense of. appreciating a feeling that approximates how many people love Outkast when you’re in the south?

And that’s been cool. So there was this sort of meta sensation of the whole thing that really brought it up to me. But getting more specific then, you mentioned this earlier, I really wanna like dive into this and maybe get dorky again for a second. But the, the jazz influence is both surface level and whe in subterranean.

And I think there are, and we can talk about obviously plenty, like, you know, speaking of surprise moments, right? 2 43 into life’s a bitch and you get a muted trumpet solo. It’s like, okay, alright, shit, that’s tight. I didn’t, okay, I didn’t expect that. That somehow works. Awesome. And then it’s, not only does it sound good, that’s Nas’s fucking dad.

Oh, okay. And then like, oh, well it’s not just his dad, his dad was himself an important musician who had a lot of influence and in history and all that in this sphere. And so

Kyle: For the listeners, avant-garde blues and Jazz corn, which is I think the first time we’ve invoked that instrument on this podcast. Olu Dara?

Cliff: yep. And even that moment, right? I’m talking about one moment in one song with a hook that you probably recognize, but haven’t thought too much about that song, probably. And then there’s a muted trumpet solo in here that’s it’s kind of jazzy, but it goes with it and it’s perfect. And then you find out who it is, and then you find out where they come from.

And just every moment is like that. Oh, I see. An interesting thing. Oh, there’s eight interesting things behind this. If I go and look into it. And I think what caught me off guard in a way, as someone who loves overthinking music for fun, it’s like I’ve sort of calcified that idea in hip hop as something that’s only gonna present through samples.

And you know, because we’ve had, you know, incredible producers and MCs and whatever over, Decades now who have used samples as the primary way to say, this is what this song is about, this is what I’m trying to invoke, whatever. And samples do get used on this record. And a lot of ’em are from old jazz records, and that’s awesome.

But like beyond just, this is a sample of a jazz record that works well here is like no, every choice had a multi-layered sort of workflow that went into it somehow. And it’s our own fault for just assuming, oh, NAS a New York based 20-year-old making this first record is not gonna think about any of this shit.

Nope, totally wrong. Like a hundred percent totally wrong. someone, whether it was NAS or this production team, seemed to think through everything and make an airtight case for stuff. so like that was one of ’em that popped out to me was just, you know, a trumpet solo, what that means and everything else.

But, even just allowing myself then to, like think sort of back and forward in history. Like we talk about. Well, okay, the Genesis hits and like everyone else will tell you, like the train has a really particular sound. So like, yeah, I didn’t live in New York for very long, but I lived there long enough to know what that sound sounds like.

And so recognizing how thoughtful, effectively, and Esoteric Noise intro was and how many people talk about it, sent me to begin with intellectually, dude, this dude is doing like Mars Volta field recordings as an opening track. And then everyone’s like, yeah, that’s tight. I think about that intro I know what it sounds like is so killer.

And then, you know, to be able to, to, hop through these individual songs and hit, New York state of mind comes on and that that little tone at the very beginning that gets repeated at, before the beat drops in. now my brain is so far open that I’m seeing connections I didn’t expect.

I’m like, oh, this is almost exactly like first breath after coma by Explosions in the

Kyle: Oh ma’am.

Cliff: And like, oh shit. That would be a really cool hip hop record. And just, rolling and rolling through thoughts like that of just like, man, this is hitting on areas already. I’m, I’m two minutes into this album and I’m thinking about stuff that I would never would’ve associated with any of this.

And, there’s probably no quote from explosions in the sky, the soft instrumental band that says, we were inspired by Nas record Illmatic. And yet the the thought of like these individual sounds and tones being so intentionally used in the songs, then those turning into songs that other people played on such repeat that it’s just in their soul.

And then seeing it pop up in other places you don’t expect once again, gave me that really early sensation I get from some records of just like, I’m sort of in the presence of something much better than me. This is cool. Like I’m ready for everything else that comes after this. And then it felt like from there on out, it was just like, I, I am just gonna take notes on everything that pops into my brain.

’cause there’s something in virtually every song that sent me in an unexpected direction.

Kyle: man. What I love about the specific sample from New York state of mind that you pulled out and using that as an example of intentionality. That high pitch noise is from flight time by Donald Bird, and they made a deliberate choice in that sample that begins with the noise of an airplane taking flight.

So it parallels with this album, beginning with Train sounds, another transportation thing. They intentionally did not incorporate the flight sound. The iconic flight sound from this record, in any way because that would imply an escape sonically from Queensbridge projects, which Nas wanted to make clear.

There was no escape from. It was a city unto itself. And even though Queens is famously where a big airport is located, there was no getting out of there if you were in qb. and that feels like one of those, dissect podcast type stretches, but it’s the people themselves who created it have commented on that.

And so that’s the kind of example where you’re like, damn, they really did. It really was that deep. Since that seems to be a parlance of so much conversation on the internet right now. Everything yes, is political and yes, everything really is that deep. If it’s good and it it lasts like this, you can be damn sure that everything is that deep.

Either it wasn’t deep at all, and they can only unpack it 50 years later on some unconscious level that they were channeling some cosmic energy. I think about like the Stooges, when I think about stuff like that, it really is all that deep, but not in any ways that they consciously chose or realized at the time they were just channeling pureed or it was like Nas, And everything was deliberate and surgical, and maybe it’s the new yorkness of it, but you know, you talk about a ballplayer putting on a clinic, it feels like a hooper like slicing through defenses and going into the rim over and over. The two thing, I, I agree with you that the two, the two elements really are, I mean, it’s hip hop, right?

It’s the beats and the lyrics. I would drill into both things a little further saying the thing for me with each respectively are the multilayered use of samples. So that was starting to take Root Q-tip being one of the pro producers on this, DJ Premier, large professor, couple of other guys.

But Premier, this is really his art form of putting together multiple layers. And the way that I kept thinking of it was like jazz bones and hip hop dressing. So it is anthropological, like it references a lot of things with what it’s doing. The jazz gives it groove, it gives it movement. And then you’ll see there’s a lot of hip hop samples, from the first 15 years of the art form.

But it’s something like the. It’s yours on the world is yours. or it’s, Hollis Groove, the Run DMC track popping up in a couple of different places. There’s a couple of Bismarck things just for like, accents, callbacks, that sort of thing, but it’s, the DJs sort of scratching it into play rather than vocal interpolation.

So that, that is like kind of a stylistic choice doing lap steel versus banjo on a country and Western record, for instance, just to give it a certain type of flavor that’s unique to your palette. Like there’s a very tight sonic palette, but it is, densely layered. It’s not like we found one good loop and we let it run.

And that was, there’s a couple of tracks like that, but a lot of these samples have three, four, even five or six elements to them. Separate drums. Separate bass, and like when you really think about pulling together existing disparate musical things from different eras and then layering in a couple of extra layers of hip hop history, like the Genesis being a great example.

You have the wild style dialogue, you have the subway theme from Wild Sow. You have. The main source live at the Barbecue NAZA’s first record. So he’s inserting himself into the sort of anthropological history, documented and wild style. And then, the main source record has like five samples in it. It’s one of many songs that sampled Bob James’s Nautilus.

it’s got that great Vicki Anderson sample. Uh, it’s got a Melvin Van Peebles thing, from Sweet Sweetback. So there’s, always like a layer after the layer, which is insane for such like a lean, economical record. and we talk about sampling all the time on this. I would make an argument for one of the reasons this is the best hip hop record, is because this is the best use of samples really anywhere.

Just it’s perfect every time. And there’s a variety of it. It’s just done masterfully. Not always maximally, there’d be none of the greatest Kanye West beats of all time. There’d be, I don’t know what the relationship to Dilla is necessarily on this, but like, I, I gotta believe that Dilla was influenced by some of this stuff.

None of the greatness of the 21st century and where we’ve come with the art form would’ve been possible without this. And then on the lyrics, I would say the three things that I noticed, a lot of people talk about the interior rhyme scheme. So you have an example like on New York state of mind, full of black rats trapped plus the island Rikers is packed.

So trapped, packed from what I hear in all the stories. When my people come back black, I’m living where the knights is Jet black, the fiends fight to get cracked. I just max, I dream I can sit back. So that’s 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, in the same two bar, three bar thing. And so when we talk about density, like not, not to be too dissect about it, but it’s full of that.

And Eminem gets made fun of by Gen Z for sort of taking that interior rhyme to its terminal velocity back with a backpack it, a backpack back. But he got it from Nas, uh, you know, NAS got it from Rakim and other places, but like again to be 18 years old. Writing with this density and dexterity is fucking unbelievable.

As a person who writes professionally every day, that’s beyond something that can be taught. You hear it in your brain that way. People obviously identified that that was special in him. So the interior rhyme, you can make a meal off of that alone with this record. Just listen for that shit and become a scholar of the bars.

somebody used English class words to describe that, that I hadn’t heard in a long time. Abstinence and in Jamin.

Again, don’t want to intellectualize over intellectualize hip hop, but like damn. That’s crazy.

Cliff: Helpful terms,

Kyle: Kendrick got a Pulitzer type stuff,

Cliff: excuse me, while I relearn Latin to understand what that means.

Kyle: NAS did and jam mint, so Kendrick could one day get a Pulitzer. the other two things are a little more physical, visceral, and they’re how the language, the use of language makes you feel. One thing I noticed after a number of listens is he shoots out of a cannon on verses starts hard and that stands out to me again as an outcast fan.

Who’s used to a big boy or somebody like that who’s syrupy, who’s behind the beat, who starts slow plays cool is player shit, pimp C.

Cliff: Lucia Scott.

Kyle: That’s right, that’s right. Coming in late, slow, taking my time. Lighting a blunt, that type vibe. So coming in hard at the front on the one is very James Brown, it’s very New York.

It’s very, let me don’t, let me miss my train. It’s very move faster, get shot out on the open street. There is a certain energy that that comes from, but it’s lightning bullshit. It’s got a survivalism to it. Again, on New York state of mind, which like I’ve always said that the most hip hop song to me is shook one’s part two.

And I, I think I continue to stand by that, but I think New York state of mind I would put right up there and I think what started to change my mind was seeing all of these basketball edits to New York state of mind and just being like, oh the art form is perfected on both levels. So like famously, a number of people have talked about Nas starting.

So like set aside the genesis is kind of an intro even though he wraps on that. Right. To me, New York state of mind is track one on this record and he starts with a pump fake. That’s a real thing that happened in the studio where he’s like, I don’t know how to start this shit. Then he goes, rappers a monkey flip, flip ’em with the funky rhythm.

I’d be kicking musician inflicting composition of pain. And you’re just like, hold, no, no, no, hold on. That’s the Xavier Renegade angel. 20 seconds that I need to listen to. 10 times where you’re like, no, you’re you were fucking playing me. You’re pool sharking. You’re pool sharking me real hard right now.

Not a scare. and that’s how it starts. And it, it punches you right in the face and it never lets go. And we’re two guys that love hardcore records. And that’s boom, you know, right into the first quarter of Blitz Creek Bop right into sailing on by bad brains. It hit me in the same way that a CBGBs band would another New York thing.

Cliff: Five snare hits and drop

the beat.

Kyle: was it five or was it four?

Cliff: It’s

five.

It’s always five.

Kyle: And then the last thing is, you know, using English class words. This record is lyrical in the poetic sense of the word lyrical. it evokes movement where it’s words with a physical feeling in your body. That’s what lyricism means. Words arranged in a way to have a rhythm, to feel like the rhythms that pulse through the blood in our body and the world around us.

And not to like wax overly poetic about lyricism as somebody whose favorite rappers are. Like, not that our love of Project Pat and my love of Gucci Mane is now well documented at this point, and I’ve made my case for them as great rappers. But this is a different thing entirely. And I was very protective against this as I previously mentioned, because of that.

But like, this is unfuckwithable. you can’t even, there’s no argument about this level of performance with the, with just to be able to do it. And if you wanna argue for something else, that’s fine. I did for a long, a long portion of my life, sit and try to write any amount of New York state of mind with your own brain and the words in it.

You can’t do it. You can’t do it. And if you can, maybe you’ll get a Pulitzer.

Cliff: Because everything is more layers like we talked about. Let’s talk more about what you just said, especially the bit about coming in fast on B one on verses, but there are two. inverses that he employs to keep himself from becoming effectively twista, where he would just be like going perpetually the entire time and just like, hold on, dude. Hold on, hold on. We’ll wait, stop.

Kyle: Twisted needs. The Paul Rudd character is like, no, don’t try to surf. Just surf. The less you do, the more you do. Twist A Koo is gonna be your instincts. We’re big Twisted fans. No, no disrespect intended

Cliff: yeah, why not?

Kyle: yeah, maybe not Big Twisted fans. We are Twisted Respecters.

Cliff: I’m a twist. I acknowledge her. Yes, I, mean, I certainly can’t do it and it does sound cool, but like this is one of a thousand examples of what we’re saying. Like the rewards you get from paying too much attention actually pay off on this record. So two things he does to make coming in fast on Beat one work. One is next time you listen through this record, not you, Kyle, necessarily, you probably noticed this, but anyone listening to this one of, one of our suggestions, I’m gonna go ahead and give you for your next active.

Listen, pay attention to what he does on the chorus. He’s almost never there. He came in on beat one of that verse and he lights everything on fire and then he totally takes four steps back. And it’s just like, does anybody else wanna do this real fast? We’re just gonna like throw up a hook. Pretty cool.

Like down to, and then, so if that feels too generic, like take the world is yours, for instance. Okay, so here’s even just a small painting of all the details involved in this. We’ve talked about the world, is yours feeling pretty inspirational and reminding us that the nineties did not feel like we were about to have to buy the dip of human civilization or whatever.

But like the world is yours as a Scarface reference.

Kyle: Mm-hmm.

Cliff: So like, there’s already a sort of interesting, okay, it’s okay, it is for all people. It’s also about this, which is not that. Okay so we’ve got this interesting concept just baked into the phrase of the song to begin with. And the hook, the chorus itself, like I’m mentioning NAZA’s, mostly not there.

Pete Rock, one of the producers on this record sang the chorus on the World is yours. Simply because Nas said in the studio, I want you to sing it. He said, no thank you. And then Nas made him do it. And that’s the like, that’s the chorus. so there’s one bit of it where like Nas front loads. All of that energy.

it’s like thinking you’re driving a fast car from the sixties and then sitting inside an electric car now. And it’s like, dude, unfortunately they cannot compare. It doesn’t matter if it’s uncool, it’s way faster. You go from zero to whatever the hell very quickly. so he eases up on the chorus, which gives you that sensation of him coming right back in every time, hard, fast, immediately as soon as possible.

So in like a musical sense, he gives you time to miss him, which is cool. And then also there are occasional tracks, and I will call out one time for your mind as one where he kind of does the opposite vibe wise for the rest of the

song. One Time for Your Mind gets described both by Nas and the producers as basically just one quote was Na Said, honestly, this song was just, Hey, we’re chilling. Like

Kyle: Large, large professor called it, large professor called it some shorty to the store. Shit.

Cliff: Yeah. So it’s acknowledgement of the pace again, we, we never wanna put too much like intentionality onto things we don’t know are intentional, but they’re sitting here telling us that they chose vibes for different points. And then again, that circles back around, I would say even in my limited New York experience, to the cadence of what living there is.

Like, yes, you’re going fast. You also stop and sit inside a bodega for a few minutes. Like you’re getting a sandwich, you’re getting a bagel, you’re getting a coffee. And it’s like, go, go, go wait for four minutes and talk to this dude who you’ve never talked to before who honestly doesn’t give a fuck about you.

But like you’re both right in front of each other’s faces. There’s nothing else you can do. And for three minutes you have this weird time dilation thing that’s happening where you’re just like packing in a social, encounter, and then you’re immediately back to whatever you were doing, because actually you were in a rush that whole time anyway, and you had somewhere to go this like stretch and push and pull of the, not, not only of the time of it, but. Trains and taxis and walking are all different speeds and take you to different places in different amounts of time with different feelings to them. And once again, like the cadence of the record and of the different songs, it’s just like, man, it feels like being there, like it feels lived in. And the expression of what feels unex expression is like palpable on a lot of these songs to a degree that, again, I didn’t expect to appreciate even knowing that that’s exactly what I’d appreciate about these songs.

Kyle: I love that idea of time dilation, and I think you’re exactly right and you also just kind of blew my mind with the, other people doing most of the choruses thing. This is a very hooky record. I think about like a one love One love one. And that’s Q-tip. You think about one time for your mind, that’s Grand Wizard.

You have Nas chiming in, bouncing off of it, but that’s Grand Wizard. You have obviously the world is yours, a very famous hook. yeah. Like half of that record or more, I guess Represent is another example,

Cliff: Halftime.

Kyle: very, halftime is an, yeah, all of those, very group involved. And I don’t really, I don’t really think about the guest spots.

I don’t really think about this as like a guest spot record maybe ’cause Nas shines so hard on it. AZ is great, e everybody’s great on it, but there’s sort of a, you I guess expect that because of the level of performance from nas. Nobody out shines him for sure. Like I just saw TI was on Manny Fresh, a juveniles podcast and he was talking about the only time he ever got his ass whooped on a song was by Andre 3000 on.

Sorry. And that just does not happen on this record. And in fact, I don’t think there’s any song where Nas is on with somebody else where he gets out barred. There are a lot of songs by great artists where you’re like, somebody had something to prove and they smoked the heavyweight chant or they went toe to toe with ’em.

There’s a lot of instances of that and that’s one of the things that makes hip hop such a great and thrilling art form ’em. ‘ cause people are hungry. Nobody, I don’t think anybody gets a punch in on Nas, but they all enhance it. That I, there is something to maybe the spirit of the way those producers all showed up that informs the vibe of the proceeding like, I’m gonna do great, but not in the typical hip hop spirit of competition.

We know we can’t kill him, so we’re not gonna try.

Cliff: It’s probably worth kind of saying directly to you to that point, you know, something relatively well known about this record but that is important enough to be said. This arguably began the era of All Star Dream team production teams on an album

Kyle: Yeah. WA was not the first famously like that had started happening. There was also stuff like the Native Tongues Collective from which we got Q-Tip and Tribe. So like we’ve already got a handful of years and examples of it. But this, I would say like sort of cemented it, I think is the point that you’re trying to make.

Cliff: Yeah, totally. and is a good kind of rubric to remember what you’re listening to. So that’s, that’s different producers who were focused on different tracks compiling the album. So that’s across dj, premier, Pete Rock, who we already mentioned, large Professor Q-Tip, who we mentioned in LES. And. So that’s just sort of an important, I think, cultural and historical moment to keep in mind because this would then go on to, anytime something seismic happens in music and people don’t totally understand it, you attract the, I would like to copy that people and people who like to copy other people without getting the gist of it, only know to look at the outside of what you’ve done.

So therefore, you know, we got a lot of like, oh, I would like to be a big hip hop star and therefore I will go get three to 10 different producers for this album. And that’s probably the secret ingredient of making a good record. No, but here it worked. Just rad.

Kyle: Yeah, you, you think about how much that was happening by the turn of the century,

Cliff: Yep.

Kyle: and if I think about the records that I would like buy or download, there was no cohesion was the problem, was like there, there wasn’t even, The rooms in the house weren’t even talking to each other. You know, one was a McDonald’s fun house and one, one was like an Italian restaurant, and it, it would be like crazy vibe shifts that were at odds with each other.

And on the one hand you respect artists for taking risks and trying different things and trying to stretch themselves, but I remember that sensation, and I’m sure you do too. You know, when we were coming of age and being like, this shit doesn’t work. Like we were in a totally different place mentally five seconds ago.

it’s, it was jarring too often. These people involved in this record, again, don’t wanna assume too much intentionality, but they were definitely going for something. And there’s enough interviews with Nas from around that time and from later where he was like, no, we knew we were on the cusp of something seismic.

And every time they felt like, oh, we got, you know, we got another one that just sort of self reinforced. So they knew it was a bit of a watershed moment and I think they dialed in on, some consistency accordingly.

Do you have a favorite? I think it’s a lot to ask a favorite song. Do you have a favorite beat? On this. ’cause I do think, like I was talking to you before recording oh man, I’ve never regarded DJ Premier as seriously as I needed to. And really, frankly, it wasn’t until the Run the Jewels song, the ul la la song, where I was like, oh, I actually really do like a lot of stuff that he’s made and I really love Gang Star. So do you have a, favorite beat on this record?

Cliff: Yeah, but I don’t know if the reason is stupid, but I’ll still answer the question anyway. It’s one love and it’s because the beat just sits on top of what I can currently only discern to be a clean bass

Kyle: Mm-hmm.

Cliff: just directly piped into the song beat on top. there are two reasons I like it, right?

I can, I cannot extract the lyrical content from the beat, and it is inherently a part of why I like it here, but trying to just speak about that music. Couple of things. One is any. Chef’s Kiss beat on top of clean base tone for Cliff Seal will always be, oh, that’s, that’s player’s ball. And I love Player’s Ball,

like the, probably thinking about songs that were played before we were ever able to track the number of times we played a song, probably most played song for me of all time.

I don’t think I could calculate how much I listened to that in particular and those records back then, but, so it’s made me appreciate not only the Simple Good Beat plus base combo, but then we talked a ton about subwoofers on the NERD episode. I learned because of Player’s Ball and my subwoofers, I started learning more about how those sounds differed and how they work together and what happens and what it sounds like when they get brought out and why certain aspects of that song were really loud when the bass would do certain things.

So, point being this not only reminded me of that, but you know, one thing that Kyle, me and you talked about sort of outside the podcast and I’ll sort of funnel in here now, I don’t think I’ve experienced a record in modern times that seemed, that sounded so different on recent headphones versus. Older, non, like computer chipped headphones that aren’t playing with the EQ by

Kyle: Yeah.

Cliff: the way that the base works sounds so different in, for instance, like modern AirPods versus a straight open back and preamp type situation which I appreciated both of them. But, so that beat was, to me, encapsulating so many of the cool things that you can do when you just play with two or three little things and do them really well.

And then to sit on top of it with, the song as a whole series of letters detailing the life events of people after they got outta prison is sick. that’s just a cool idea, man. It’s not a song about anything and it’s about everything at the same time. And it’s people and it’s real and it’s in its actual and meaningful and came from a thing.

And all of that just has such a visceral quality to it that I, I’ve ended up loving probably that song as much as any.

Kyle: Do you have any speculation why you think it is that this record varies so much in different types of speakers? I agree with you. I didn’t observe it until you pointed it out, but the idea, I think it probably fluctuates more than anything we’ve talked about. Recently, you know, we’ve speaker checked in a bunch of different environments, and we’re on the third year of this calendar and still practicing like active listening of these things.

So we have a deep familiarity with like, pretty well everything we are covering at this point. And I feel like we have observed a pretty good deal of consistency actually in a number of the, I think about like an odetta where the clarity is sort of the thing and contrast that with this where different details jump out.

Like do you have any technical or sonic observations about why you think that might be?

Cliff: Yes, but I will simultaneously sound smart to half the audience and really dumb to the other half. So let’s find out. It’s something about compression, it’s something about the way that we now, through headphone EQs and through what noise cancellation is attempting to do, all those sorts of things, we seem to put more of an. In human type of compression, a thing that doesn’t occur naturally in a room. We seem to produce and master our music more like that now because we are often, I think, listening in more and more closed environments, headphones pointed right back into our brains versus speakers that are pointed out into a general area and like, completely obvious statement, the early and mid nineties were still heavily a bring your big boombox outside level thing, right?

I think there’s a lot of that combined with, so far as I can tell Nas didn’t, hasn’t taken the bait on like, Hey, let’s remaster your tracks and release them to people who might pay us

money thing. And so we get to experience a non-modern mastering necessarily of an older one. And I, so I think that’s part of what it is, but it something about that combination of things, plus somehow these specific samples and beats and tones that they were using on this record really brings it out.

I cannot express how much, almost louder every beat sounds on certain songs in different contexts compared to other ones where it just sounds. Never bad to be clear, never bad or wrong, but you know, more classic or traditionally mixed.

Kyle: One Love is a specifically good example of that, where on a really good pair of headphones, sort of a, a classic. Older, not digitally altered one, one loves drums, have so much reverb and depth and stuff that you don’t really hear. It kind of gets lost in the mid range. I, I ask because, you know, Bob Power just passed away.

Bob Power was responsible for the sound of so much of the hip hop and r and b that we love Soul Query and stuff, native tongue stuff. if Q-Tip and Quest love are devastated about the loss of an engineer, producer guy, then that’s a big deal. So a lot of these people talked about Bob Power as someone who taught them to draw out the sonic elements to that were in their head to the best of their ability.

And there’s something about 1994 and learning, sort of developing the craft of this multi-layered sample thing into newer and quickly evolving pieces of technology. You know, getting everything from, like, getting different qualities of rips of these samples, layering them in certain ways. I have to imagine that between the capture, where they’re learning new techniques.

Be engineering, mixing and mastering of those layers, which is something between live capture and music concrete and, you know, it’s, it’s old and new and everything between, and then vocal takes on microphones of different qualities and stuff captured in some whatever studios, some really nice studios, you know, he’s got some Columbia records budget and studio attraction for this.

But a lot of hip hop doesn’t necessarily get that treatment. so it’s, again, this is all speculative and it’s the kind of thing that we try to avoid, but I’m so fascinated by this idea of the variability in it. And it’s not the only thing we’ve ever talked about with lots of elements and pastiche and, and interesting types of layering.

You maybe I go back and listen to Togo Mago, something like a can or something like a tangerine dream with a lot of electronic sequencing to think about, well these were moments where they were having breakthroughs in composition and engineering. I also thought a little bit about Mingus and all the disparate elements that he put in on that record and just the volume.

Of all that, and there’s a lot of density to that too. I don’t know anyone listening. I would definitely be interested for like, what’s the technical take on the variability? It does. I will say like, that is a rabbit hole. You can go down. you don’t have to, but it, it does, it makes it really enjoyable.

That different context unveil a lot of different surprises constantly.

Cliff: Yep. And there’s probably a non-zero overlap with the loudness wars, which we’ve talked about in the past as well. Just a whole lot of stuff that evolved the way that we expect to hear music that comes out in an interesting way here. I would love though you mentioned Mingus. I’ve been holding in a particular jazz thing.

I think we often try to give suggestions for active listening, what to pay attention to. kind of naturally already covered a few, but. One that I think is personally is really cool and kind of connected me to a lot of the different hip hop artists that we’ve mentioned specifically around cadence, rhyming scheme and delivery.

maybe I’m stretching it here, but this is how I would frame it. You call jazz the bones earlier

Kyle: The bones are their money.

Cliff: I think that’s a really cool way to think of it. A specific illustration of that he does a cadence in his delivery here that I feel like manifested in so many songs that you don’t know how to hear it now, but it’s jazz. And on top of it being jazz it, you even mentioned Togo Mago a second ago. Like this comes into play.

There’s a sort of free jazz thing in some of the cadences. I’m gonna give you examples and possibly embarrass myself, but this is important to me. There’s a cadence he’ll do that is jazzy in the sense that it leaves the beat and comes right and comes back to it in a moment that you don’t really know how to expect.

And what I mean by that is specifically listening for, he’ll do this, COTA, dta, dta dta, dta, dta. Now I’m very sorry for doing that with my mouth, but like, I’m gonna give some examples. But on top of it, before we, I even give other lyrical examples, it connects to, I mentioned like Togo Mago, like the free jazz beat drumming of even something like the Mars Volta where they’ll have interludes and they’ll do drumming.

Thomas PRI will do Dun

and like it plays with the beat and adds and removes them at seemingly random intervals fast enough for your brain not to be totally sure. Are we still on the beat or did we find a sub beat? but before you know it, it’s back on one and you kind of go, oh shit, okay, how did that happen? And like, for the record, that’s exactly pretty much what jazz is.

If you enjoy jazz, it’s going, wait a minute, hold it. Oh shit. Okay, cool. Over and over and over again. So. I think there is a, not just appreciation for like a fast and smooth delivery, but seeing that cadence in particular. So we’ve mentioned, outcast really heavily, obviously so like examples of that.

We even referenced this earlier, but an example of what I mean by this cadence, so big boy’s first verse on sores. So clean, he does the little intro we joked about, right, sir Lucia Scott. But then he goes, Gator Belts and Patti Melts and Monte Carlos and El Dorados. I’m waking up out on my slumber feeling light rot, like okay wait, where is that beat?

And you hear it ’cause the beat is so fresh, so clean Ritz, right? But like he’s

Kyle: windshield wiper. It’s It’s parabolic. Yeah. Yeah. He swings in and out of it. Yeah.

Cliff: yeah. But it’s, and it also never ne or doesn’t necessarily have to be in equilibrium. Sometimes they’ll add two or three beats on one part. what’s amazing about it, and is jazzy about it, is it plays with how your brain is perceiving the time and the cadence of that music.

Because if you start active listening to it, eventually you’ll go, wait a minute, did we add beats? Did we divide them?

Kyle: Mm-hmm.

Cliff: Did we stretch into another line entirely and it gives you, all of a sudden you’ve got this, and maybe not everybody’s like me, but you get this sort of mka kick pattern level thing where it’s just like, oh my God, where does this actually plug in?

Oh shit, he hits the beat crazy there, but he’s not doing it over here. And he sort of adds these things that give you a cadence and an a wobbliness to it. And when I realized that this was likely part of the genesis of a lot of that cadence and a lot of what came after it, I couldn’t unhear it. I could hear it in outcast songs after that.

another kind of weirdish deep cut that I’ve mentioned, I think on another episode before. But you may have mentioned, I think run the Jewels earlier. So like LP really specifically, back when he did this EP called, uh, I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead, which I loved so much. But.

Kyle: I might have been born yesterday, sir, but I stayed up all night.

Cliff: Right, right, right, right, right. Yeah. But he, inside of that, he does a bunch of this. Like verse two is like, the whole design got my mind crying. If I’m lying, I’m dying. You drop right into this stuff and you have to trust the mc to guide you back to the underlying beat. And if the whole reason, this is interesting to me, not just Jazzy in general, but one of the things I opened with at the top of this episode was from the source review where it says, your mind races to keep up with NA’s lyricism while your body dips to the beat.

If the mc doesn’t know how to bring your dumb ass back to the beat, your body can’t dip to it at all. It’s gonna be like listening to art that you don’t groove to, which could be cool and I appreciate weird artistic stuff. Fine, but it’s not groovy for those two things. To stay orbiting each other constantly throughout this record is a level of musicianship that cannot be over appreciated.

I think it is. It is a detail that’s blown me away on every listen.

Kyle: I love that. I think the, the bringing it back thing is another astute point. Without that, you get that. What am I supposed to be looking at feeling that you get standing in front of a big painting at the museum. What am I supposed to get from this? The hook, as Blues traveler famously said, brings you back.

it’s important, like it works for a reason, right? People fight. People have fought the form for the entirety of the three, three minute pop songs existence, but it works for a reason because we are rhythmic creatures and our hearts beat in a circular way, like circles are the shape of the world, literally and spiritually.

So bringing stuff back really works. I also love, you know, I wonder how many people have ever invoked the Mars Volta in relation to nas, but the first time that the weird beat where you have to count it just to figure out like, when is the one gonna come back around? I was aware Passingly of Shuga in high school, but Mond Sickness was the first time that that feeling that I ever wanted to hang with a rhythm that I didn’t understand wasn’t a jazz kid growing up. You go back and listen to the beginning of this podcast, you can sort of chart my journey as a jazz lover.

but I remember the,

and I can hear, I can feel it. I’ve internalized it now, but. It was years. It was like, oh, it was a a four and then a two, and then a three, and then a whatever. And then another famously Cliff esque band, the Chariot, that’s a Josh Skogen move, you know, do it. And almost in a James Brownie way, you know, hit me six times now, hit me two times, it’ll hit me five times.

You know? I love that is, um, you find jazz headspace in very non jazz places. Uh, it’s a very, cliff esque thing. And I think you have probably subconsciously brought me to jazz in that way, through things that people would describe themselves as jazz. So as they say in letter, Kenny, I appreciates that about you.

Cliff: I love encouraging people with it. Jazz is at once. There are no rules and you’re not good enough to be doing this, and I love both of those things together.

Kyle: You can’t handle the freedom. Yeah. feel free to, if there are other sonic things that you wanna point out, please do. But I, you mentioned the, where do you go from here? Certainly you can always go back to outcast. We’re never gonna not say that to you, but tell me some other things you think people should do.

Cliff: Oh man. Yeah, that’s, that’s an exasperated sigh only because it’s acknowledgement that, once again, this isn’t the Hardcore History podcast, so I do not have six hours, so I will try to do this quickly, but like, there, there are varying amounts of how much a record sends us in different directions. I think we, again, we always try to show you the. Nexus n of everything. Thi this one though, sort of like the, the nexus. This is like the, the FD internet hub in Oslo or whatever. Like you cannot get anywhere else without going through this for the most part. And in that sense, because of anything from who did this record, who produced it, the samples that they used, the people who would sample this afterwards, the people Nas was inspired by the people he was surrounded by.

Every direction has 10 years worth of exploration to do. So I think that rules, first maybe the easiest, there’s the sort of crate digger mentality of the whole thing. Samples on samples. Where did they come from? Where did they go? I’m guessing you might touch on some of that yourself.

So I just wanna call that out as like, yes, I think that’s a legitimate place to go. It’s really fascinating. I found myself being a rock him fan after this record in a way that I did not expect before. It was not hard to, to immediately start appreciating those records which ruled. So that direction back and forth works.

I do think though, secondly, against all odds, this reinvigorated my appreciation for lyricism. As much as I famously dislike it in a lot of music it is not just used to great effect here. And not just inspired and inspiring, but like, I was just trying to give one sample of like, if you listen and let the cadence kind of get in your bones a little bit more like an earworm like past the hook and into like I can sort of, I could start wrapping this if I wanted to type thing.

You’ll start to feel those rhythmic moves in different places you didn’t know to feel them because of what an explosive change NAS specifically was in terms of, I mean, there are plenty of interviews that basically just like put Jay-Z on blast and they’re like, well before this it was just x, y, Z cadence.

And then after that JD Jay-Z actually got smooth and just like straight up started copying Nas. I don’t know if that’s like an academically defensible position but you can see it, and especially if you let yourself see it that way, you can see what they’re talking about. You understand where people are coming from.

Like people heard this record and shifted the way that they were making music because they were like, that’s actually cooler and I think that that’s gonna work. so there was the. To me, it goes past just like, who was the best rapper or whatever, and goes into like, okay, if we were gonna do the sort of semi lame thing of like, everyone gets a participation trophy for being a good rapper, what is the special thing that you bring to the table?

Like it actually works here. it really can give you like, here’s what Nas did and here’s what NAS didn’t do that someone else did that you’re looking for that. That’s what Biggie did. That’s what Pock did. That is what happened on the West Coast. That’s what ha what happened in southern rap, it’s funk over there. It’s jazz over here. Like in giving that sense of like, oh wait a minute. I have to remember pre-internet people around each other are the people around each other. They’re the ones inspiring each other to be better and different or whatever. East Coast and West Coast was like a new emergent thing coming basically from television.

And so just that deeper appreciation for, you know, I’ve always loved a fast wordy rapper, always. So there’s so much for me to look in here or look into here. But again, specifically going downstream of this and trying to just start going. Okay. All right. Biggie Wu-Tang Pac Mob Deep. Over here. Then we’ve talked about, you know, all the, all the other exploration we’ve already done around tribe and everything else that happened there.

And like, okay, that’s, similar but different and the lyricism is different within those things for particular reasons. And why and where did it come from? Like it just really engaged the full on fucking dork part of me about MCs. Like I, I would’ve usually, I think, found myself on the producer side of this sort of interest when it comes to hip hop records, because I have for better or worse, a really ridiculous standard for being interested in lyrics.

And, but this is, this is sort of like my World series man. Like, so everything about it excited me, took me on to other records, reminded me of things that fascinated me in other hip hop songs that were, you know, in another category entirely from the other stuff I’ve talked about liking, you know, we mentioned like blog and cloud rap and stuff that’s like on another fucking planet compared to what this is.

And for me to realize that I as a person who doesn’t give myself very much credit for loving hip hop enough, have like such distinct and discreet loves for such different types of hip hop. Kind of reinvigorated me again around this stuff. And it’s just, it’s made me excited to do the, like clicking through playlist and related artists 1 million times on every music a PII can find to start building stuff up.

And I’ve just not had a bad time no matter what I’ve tried to do from here

And for you.

Kyle: I agree with everything that you said. I love the thought of you listening to, to Rakim. ’cause that starts to get he’s the front door back to the like, huh? He’s not that. But then he starts to get to, you know, then I picture you snowboarding too. Some, some goofy early eighties shit, that I know you would never listen to beyond just like clinical appreciation value, nor would I very much for that

matter.

Cliff: Yeah.

Kyle: so I think there’s a few things here absolutely on the lyricism bit.

I don’t have your high bar. I just want people who are interesting and unique. I talk a lot about the Prince principle, like there’s only one Gucci Mane ever. I’m not going out looking for the next person that I can put on a list to argue about, but it did remind me that there are a lot of people who are a mix of those two archetypes.

They are interesting and they are one of one, and they are technically very competent. So I mentioned recently the latest ASAP Rocky record. Another New Yorker has his own style, some grit and some jazz. I still think and will say until the day that I die of black thought is one of the best ever to do it.

He’s never made anything as perfect as illmatic. So that’s its own thing. But if you want the density and the intricacy, good time to revisit some black thought.

I found myself wanting to listen to a lot of MF Doom again after this.

Cliff: Man, he’s about to get that Avengers knock on SEO, and I’m excited for him even posthumously.

Kyle: yeah, yeah. and the anniversary of Mad Villain just came back around, in March. So that’s always a good reminder for me. you mentioned lp. I think we also gotta mention Ka as like another distinctly New York. Incredibly hard. Definitely influenced by Nas person. I thought about Dead Preez.

Cliff: I was literally putting a pin in where, can I interrupt Kyle to make sure I bring back up how this made me listen to Less Gift Free again? Oh yeah. If for no other reason than realizing that Illmatic got sampled on a Jay-Z track called Dead Presidents too, and I just happened to put on dead Preez the other day sort of for a different reason.

And then once again had the like, oh, we are one NA Nas, NAS himself would be the first to tell you that it is in fact bigger than hip hop. we both like to show love to Vince Staples. I think there’s a lot of the like attitude and the intentionality in Vince’s projects that come through. Certainly the sense of place, Ramona Park, south Central, like all that you get from Vince’s music.

Kyle: Very visual. there’s a lot of Earl sweat. Like Earl gets into these fractualize sort of artsy thing, but he’s got the poet laureate father. Nas has the avant-garde jazz father and is taking things in an interesting new direction. There’s not a single Earl project to me that has the focus of this.

They’re lean, they’re good. I love Earl sweatshirt. I think he is incredible, but I don’t think there’s a single generational Earl record. But if you, if you want to take it a little more in the avant direction, I think he’s as good as he gets thought about Danny Brown, like punk rock version of all of this.

I thought about Saba. My brother Cody would be mad if I went the whole time on a great hip hop episode and didn’t talk about an artist like Saba. I thought about JID, the main thing that I thought about. doesn’t have the density of NA’s lyrics, but certainly has the grit. And the new Yorkness is Griselda.

It’s Conway, the machine, Benny, the butcher. All the associated people around that orbit that pop up on some of those projects. The Boldy, James, the Davies, Griselda is Buffalo. They are upstate, but they are so motherfucking New York. They’re the hardest out in a lot of ways right now. so they’re a bit of the Wu-Tang, a bit of the Nas.

They’re so sick, they’re so, so sick. and again, there’s, there’s a bit of the collective, you know, we talk about Soul Query and Native Tongues, all that odd future. We love a collective big roving gang of people that are all talented on their own and better together. couple of other things. One, go down the DJ Premier Rabbit Hole for sure.

Listen to gang star. Gang star is so good. go down a turntableist rabbit hole. you mentioned collision course, which makes me think of the other Lincoln Park. Cinematic Universe Project The Executioners that had that song with Mike Shenoda. great Cut. Chemist, the executioners are, I think Rakim is mandatory listening.

I think Cool g Rap is mandatory listening. we did not mention Russell Simmons of Def Jam somewhat famously passing on signing Nas to Def Jam saying that he just sounded like Cool g Rap Times has proven what a dumb ass Russell Simmons is. So that all worked out fine. He signed Warren G and Warren G went triple platinum in the summer of 94.

So, Russell got the, he satisfied hit the motivation that he wanted for Def Jam. But like we talked about with Bjork, staying true to yourself and following your own artistic intent pays off better in the long run. with no disrespect to Warren g Illmatic is Illmatic. two other things. One nineties production, nineties hip hop production at its finest. There’s a lot of compare and contrast with Public Enemy and the bomb squad I saw this interesting spectrum that Nas got compared on where you had Public Enemy on the one end. You know, forcing people to take a political stance, an action of a certain kind, an NWA on the other end, glorifying violence and Nas in the middle, being realistic about all of it and just sort of like presenting the case and leaving it to you.

I thought that was interesting if a bit reductive, but Public Enemy is an interesting contrast here ’cause of bomb squad production. I also think because Q-Tip is a producer on one of these songs, going back and revisiting his production, one of the all time greats alongside DJ Premier, just revisiting tribe.

Never bad to do that, just strictly from a production and sampling standpoint. I think we’ve said plenty about the sampling bit at this point. The last thing I would say is one of the articles maybe in the Pitchfork article written by Jeff Weiss, as in passion of the Weiss, gave it a perfect 10.

It’s one of the best write-ups like I’ve ever, ever seen. So I want to give that flowers. It’s so sensational, the quality and the density of that writing. But there’s comparisons to Marvin Gaye’s, what’s going on, which, I could take or leave that comparison, but there’s comparisons to living in the city and how a lot of the spirit of matic is a spiritual succession to the way Stevie Wonder presents and lays out musically and lyrically living in the city.

So comparing Illmatic to another American classic, distinctly American classic being Innervisions songs in the Key of Life, being the like main record that people point to with Stevie Innervisions is definitely my favorite Stevie record. And I think more in line with the spirit of this one, when you have songs like Living for the City and certainly Higher Ground, they pair really well together.

Something about the texture of them feels like they belong sort of in the same camp. The reds and oranges of the cover, of Queensbridge Housing and the yellow of the city on the cover of Innervisions, they all feel somewhat in the same palette to me. So I would leave it on that note, like maybe the point there is find.

How it situates in the Great American story and the pantheon of great American art that moves you. And as we try to find our footing for what the next two 50 will be, if this country even lasts that much fucking longer.

Cliff: I certainly won’t,

Kyle: yeah. To be Bill Hicks about it though. You know, like, what’s the point? Let’s find a point. We gotta have hope amongst the horrors. And not to hang too much on Ill MAD’s hat rack, but like Illmatic came from the worst things about America and it is one of the best things about America. maybe starting to compare it to connect it to the web, the tapestry of other greatly American things.

America’s only gonna be great again if we can actually make it that way. If we find things to love about it and we tell those stories, I mean, shit. Think about New York right now and what a bellwether, an energizer mom Donny has been and how that’s been a lightning rod for the rest of the country.

Like New York maybe is the greatest city in the world. I will say it begrudgingly because as it goes, so much of the world goes so like we gotta reclaim the American story. And that is not at all something that I was thinking about, talking about going into this episode, but straight up this record is so good, it makes me proud to be an American and that is a sentence that I have not said out of my mouth in a long time. maybe that’s the point. May, you know, maybe it can do something for you on a musical level, but maybe it can do something on a much steeper spiritual level for you as well.