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I also found a nice little piece published by the New Yorker around this time championing Illmatic as "special," even among the myriad classic albums of that era (Wu, Jay, Big, blah, blah, blah) but I figured... who the fuck cares what some shitass New Yorker writer thinks of a hip-hop album anyway? So I have omitted that.
And for the record, I actually am not that big of a Nas fan! I only like about ˝ of his albums. Love his voice, loved him at his peak (he was one of the few rappers that made a young Nirvana-drunk Severian stand up and take notice of the intelligence and authenticity of his lyrics and delivery) but I kind of parted ways with him when I got really into Jay. By the time Jay dropped the Black Album, I thought it was damn generous to even call what happened between them a feud. Jay KO'd Nas, not with beef verses, but with increasingly good albums. Jay went up, Nas went down.
Point is, I'm not hanging on Nasir's dick. But there's no way to make a sane argument that Illmatic isn't a landmark album that changed hip-hop forever.
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