Before the curtain lifted at the Moore Theater last night and New York rap icon Nas stepped out to the initial strains of his Illmatic opener “Genesis,” everyone present already knew him. Of course the 1,800 member audience did; but the tremendous documentary Time is Illmatic, which had only finished just moments before, made it impossible to escape the feeling that you really knew him.
The 75-minute feature looks back at the Queensbridge Projects in New York were a young Nasir Jones was raised and honed his craft as a fledgling rap artist. Viewers are subjected to the numerous roadblocks that might have kept the young man from ever realizing his potential. A tumultuous family life leading to his parent’s divorce, the introduction of crack and the surge of gang violence that came in its wake, the broken education system and the murder of his friend and fellow rapper Ill Will.
By its end, it’s astounding the rapper ever made it out of that world at all, and filmmakers push the idea that it’s a testament to his own natural skill and internal drive that he was able to. The point was driven home with a picture of the rapper seated with a group of his neighborhood friends taken the day the Illmatic cover was photographed. Onscreen, Nas’ brother Jabari recounts the sad end, whether by jail or death, of nearly every figure in the portrait, with one singular exception. Nas himself weighs in, and his reflections are crushing.
Through the years, the artist has gained a reputation for being guarded with his own personal thoughts and feelings. Big kudos should be given to director One9 and writer Erik Parker who were able to get him to open up as much as he did—a process that reportedly took ten years to accomplish. He’s candid about his feelings regarding his father and the impact his absence had on him. He doesn’t avoid reliving the pain of losing friends and doesn’t downplay his own ambition to become a great MC.
As soon as the film had finished, the projection screen shot into the rafters and Nas emerged in the flesh, clad all in black with a large gold chain dangling around his neck. The crowd absolutely erupted as he tore into “NY State of Mind” and was eager to fill-in on the track’s classic refrain, “sleep is the cousin of death.” “Life’s a Bitch” followed and then “The World Is Yours” and “Halftime,” until nearly an hour later he’d run through every track from Illmatic.
The audience ate the whole thing up, many rapping every verse right back to the New York MC. For his part, Nas seemed thrilled to be there, cracked jokes about the state’s legal marijuana laws, and traded numerous hand shakes and high-fives with those pressed up closest to the stage. By the end of the night, after closing out the set with his hyped Stillmatic single “One Mic,” he’d fulfilled the entertainer’s eternal promise to leave everyone wanting more.
It’s an odd dynamic for an artist to set up his own personal story as the opening act, especially through such an exposed medium as film. As a crowd goer, it’s a whole different frame of mind when its feels like you’ve lived inside the mind of such a person for a minute, or at the very least, walked a few miles in their shoes. For such an intimate setting, it had the effect of making the whole thing seem very personal. It wasn’t just a live set of words and beats, the message and the world of Illmatic were very much brought to life on that stage.
