Nas: Illmatic Clear Vinyl LP

Why you'll love it

Illmatic is regularly ranked the greatest hip-hop album ever made, and the producer line-up is untouchable: DJ Premier, Pete Rock, Q-Tip, Large Professor and L.E.S. Ten tracks, no filler, and this pressing is on clear vinyl.

This edition

Clear vinyl
Columbia / Legacy pressing (cat# 19439843111)

About the album

Nasir bin Olu Dara Jones (better known to you and me as simply Nas) was barely out of his teens and already an underground hip-hop hotshot when Illmatic arrived via Columbia Records to a whole lotta hype and great, great expectations in April of 1994.

It seems incredible, in hindsight, not just that such a monumental rap record was the young MC's very first album but also that, at the time, it took a while to find its audience. Illmatic was in it for the long game, though, and has rightly assumed its place alongside the greatest hip-hop albums of all time in the years since. It still sounds as fresh as it did in 1994, with Nas's eloquently tricky street-life rhymes (drawn from his experiences growing up in the Queensbridge housing projects in Queens, New York) dancing atop unfussy, hard-edged-but-elegant production from the likes of DJ Premier, Q-Tip, Pete Rock and Large Professor. East Coast hip-hop would never be quite the same. Hell, hip-hop in general would never be quite the same. It just took a little extra time for the world at large to catch up with Illmatic's greatness. But catch up it did.

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