Nas

At sixteen, Nas found his way into the studio where Rakim was cutting his own records and stood there taking notes with his ears. The debt he owed is written into hip-hop's own oral history: the DJ and producer DJ Clark Kent put it plainly — "Everybody was rapping before Rakim. Then Rakim comes and everybody starts rhyming." By the time Illmatic landed, the handoff looked complete enough that critic Rob Marriott could write that Rakim, "who laid the foundation upon which Nas built his opus, found himself in a kind of limbo once Illmatic established Nas as his second coming."

listen: upstream & heresource: Literary Hub — A Brief Oral History of Rakim and the Golden Age of Hip-Hop (DJ Clark Kent on Rakim's impact) ↗share

1987

Paid in FullRakim

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1994

N.Y. State of MindNas

listen forRakim never raises his voice on "Paid in Full" — the rhymes land inside the beat instead of on top of it, internal rhymes threaded mid-line so the verse reads like it's folding in on itself. "N.Y. State of Mind" borrows that same unhurried, coiled delivery, and it does so literally: the hook lifts Rakim's own instrumental "Mahogany" from the Paid in Full album, so Nas is quite audibly rapping over his teacher's beat while extending his sentence-inside-a-sentence technique into full paranoid, room-by-room narration.

Nas's father, cornetist Olu Dara, spent the 1970s and '80s in New York's avant-garde jazz scene, touring alongside David Murray and Cassandra Wilson years before his son picked up a mic. Promoting the Illmatic documentary in 2014, Nas put the debt in one line: "My dad is one of my biggest influences and even did his own thing on #Illmatic. He always thought I was gonna be a trumpet player but I ended up rhyming instead." It wasn't symbolic: Nas asked his father to close "Life's a Bitch" on cornet, telling Rolling Stone, "I told him to play whatever comes to mind when he thinks of me as a kid."

listen: upstream & heresource: Vice — The Story Behind Nas's 'Illmatic' Is Almost as Great as the Album Itself (Olu Dara's role in the album) ↗share

1980

MingOlu Dara

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1994

Life's a BitchNas

listen forOn the David Murray Octet's 1980 recording "Ming," Olu Dara's cornet threads through the horn section with a rough, vocal-toned phrasing that owes as much to the blues as to jazz technique. Fourteen years later, that same instrument closes "Life's a Bitch" unaccompanied — no beat, no rhyme, just the cornet worrying a phrase over and over the way a preacher worries a line. It's the one moment on Illmatic where the hip-hop stops entirely and the source material speaks for itself.

The same 1989 studio where Nas watched Rakim record also belonged, some days, to Kool G Rap — and Nas absorbed him too, so thoroughly Def Jam passed on his demo, saying he sounded too much like G Rap already. G Rap heard it differently once he heard the young Queensbridge rapper himself: "I do hear a lot of influence, but then again, I hear the influence of Rakim in him," he said. "I understand I may have been an influence on Nas, but I heard his originality, as well." Rolling Stone later credited G Rap's narratives as "a style that would come to define later Queens MCs like Nas."

listen: upstream & heresource: Wikipedia — Kool G Rap (Rolling Stone and Peter Shapiro on G Rap's influence on Nas) ↗share

1989

Road to the RichesKool G Rap

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1991

Live at the BarbequeNas

listen for"Road to the Riches" moves at a clip that barely lets a rhyme resolve before the next one starts stacking on it — G Rap narrating a criminal rise in the same rushed, cinematic present tense he'd patent for a decade of Queens rap. Nas's first released verse, on Main Source's "Live at the Barbeque," chases that same density at seventeen years old — internal rhymes doubled and tripled inside single lines — and the resemblance was so immediate that it got him noticed by, and then compared directly to, G Rap himself.