Chia-Hui Preston

Home , Genius (website), Illmatic, Made You Look, Rawkus Records

You have full text access to this content “My Pen Rides the Paper”: Hip-Hop, the Technology of Writing and Nas's Illmatic

1. Graham Chia-Hui Preston

Article ﬁrst published online: 8 SEP 2008

DOI: 10.1111/j.1533-1598.2008.00161.x

Issue

Journal of Popular Music Studies

Volume 20, Issue 3, (/doi/10.1111/jpms.2008.20.issue-3/issuetoc) pages 261–275, September 2008

(http://www.altmetric.com/details.php? domain=onlinelibrary.wiley.com&doi=10.1111/j.1533- 1598.2008.00161.x) Additional Information

How to Cite

Chia-Hui Preston, G. (2008), “My Pen Rides the Paper”: Hip-Hop, the Technology of Writing and Nas's Illmatic. Journal of Popular Music Studies, 20: 261–275. doi: 10.1111/j.1533-1598.2008.00161.x

Author Information

University of Melbourne Publication History

1. Issue published online: 8 SEP 2008 2. Article ﬁrst published online: 8 SEP 2008

Abstract (/doi/10.1111/j.1533-1598.2008.00161.x/abstract) Article References (/doi/10.1111/j.1533-1598.2008.00161.x/references) Cited By (/doi/10.1111/j.1533-1598.2008.00161.x/citedby)

Enhanced Article (HTML) (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/enhanced/doi/10.1111/j.1533-1598.2008.00161.x) Get PDF (487K) (/doi/10.1111/j.1533-1598.2008.00161.x/epdf)Get PDF (487K) (/doi/10.1111/j.1533- 1598.2008.00161.x/pdf)

You a slave to a page in my rhyme book! 1 Nas, “Made You Look” (2002)

The Author, when believed in, is always conceived as the past of his own book: book and author stand automatically on a single line divided into a before and an after. The Author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” (2001: 222, emphasis in original)

Hip-hop music and culture have been primarily presented and then transmitted through aural and/or visual rather than written forms. Hip-hop's canonical four elements—DJing, emceeing, break dancing, and graffiti arts—are, for the most part, not invested with and determined by what one could traditionally think of as the technology of writing, to use terminology from Walter Ong. Instead of engaging one on a primarily textual level, the emphasis in hip-hop culture is on the visual and aural experience of the work. Graffiti art, which is also known as “writing,” could perhaps be seen as an exception but even in graffiti, the word (usually the name of the artist) is extremely aestheticized almost beyond 2 recognition. The word itself is turned into a visual experience and the scriptural meaning of the word is obscured if not impossible to discern.

3 In the case of rap lyrics, this point can be born out by noting that most rap albums do not feature the lyrics in the liner notes. Anyone trying to experience them must do it through an aural encounter with the raps (that is, before turning to the Internet). In other words, rap is meant to be heard, not read. While this may seem like a somewhat self-evident notion, it must be taken into consideration when attempting to subject rap lyrics to an interpretation derived primarily through literary techniques. But a close reading of a mostly oral poetic form is not inherently problematic and without merit. Importantly, I contend that such an approach can open and interrogate spaces that are created in the tension of this duality between literacy and orality. I should add here that this article does not wish to side-step questions of how elements of performance strategically foreground or obscure meaning in the lyrics, or, in other words, how presentation of the lyrics brings life to the words. Instead, the emphasis in this article is squarely focused upon how formal features can be decoded and explained through close reading, a speciﬁc analytic rubric of literary studies, of hip-hop lyrics. In the end, I think performance is inherently linked to formal qualities; the two form a mutually reliant relationship that need not be oppositional. This article purposefully limits itself to close readings of Nas's lyrics themselves in order to give the proper attention and space to primarily how Nas's poetics work in literary terms and second how they work with aural, visual, and performance media.

On his classic debut album Illmatic (1994), Nas (Nasir Jones) is acutely aware of the predominance of the oral in hip-hop music. Simply put, his gripping narratives and rhymes are a virtuosic example of the possibilities of heard rap through their intricate uses of interior rhyme, complicated 4 rhyming patterns, and enjambment. But, in explicit terms and somewhat paradoxically, Nas constructs himself as a writer or, in other words, he sees his rhymes as operating very much in the literary realm. This article then seeks to explore his work on these very literary terms. For example, in “N.Y. State of Mind,” Nas tells us that he is a [m]usician inﬂictin' composition Of pain. I'm like Scarface snifﬁn' cocaine Holdin' a M-16, see, with the pen, I'm extreme (emphasis added).

Nas stresses the importance of the pen and all that it signifies as a metonym. The pen is also opposed to the gun (“a M-16”) when Nas asserts that it is the pen and his ability to write, and not the gun (which is held by the cocaine abusing film character Scarface) that makes him “extreme.” His status as a radical and perhaps his worth as an artist, is primarily derived not from the gangster fantasy perpetuated by Brian de Palma's film but from his ability to write rhymes, which he in turn delivers when he raps.

Nas's conception of himself as a writer, a street poet with a pen and a microphone, inﬂuences the narratives that he creates and disseminates. He sketches himself as a solitary observer of the life, death, and grime of the city rather than as an active participant in the stories of his raps. This paradox—Nas's self-construction as a writer exactly through participation in and mastery of an oral culture—is not an example of incoherence but should be seen as a fundamental feature of Nas's poetry.

Before I go further, I think a brief account of Nas and his importance as an artist in hip-hop culture is necessary here. Nasir “Nas” Jones was born on September 14, 1973 and he is the son of Olu Dara, a talented jazz and blues musician (Birchmeier 2008; Dyson 2007: 42). He grew up in the notorious Queensbridge Housing Projects in Queens, New York and he dropped out of school in the eighth grade (Dyson 2007: 42). He has released nine albums to date, including Illmatic in 1994, with a tenth record to be unveiled in 2008. Nas is well known for his smooth ﬂow and his complex lyrics, which are introspective, intensely crafted, and densely rhythmic. Michael Eric Dyson has called Nas “one of the most ﬁercely gifted lyricists in the history of hip-hop” (42–43). Dyson goes further when he names Nas a “rhetorical genius” (43). In an interview with the Associated Press published on MSNBC.com, Nas describes himself as merely a “storyteller” (“Nas: The Mature Voice of Hip-Hop”(2005)). These two positions need not be seen as contradictory, as it is through Nas's recounting of stories that what one could call his “rhetorical genius” comes through. In other words, Nas's genius is made apparent exactly through his lyrics and music, which, as we shall see, are mainly concerned with stories.

In any case, in “One Time 4 Your Mind,” Nas offers us a way to think through the apparent paradox of his literary orality. In the second verse, he raps:

My pen rides the paper, it even has blinkers Think I'll dim the lights then inhale, it stimulates Never plan to stop, when I write my hand is hot.

In only three lines, Nas presents a complex metaphor by purposefully conflating his writing, an automobile and his flow—his ability to rap on beat. The first two are perhaps much more obvious than the latter. In Black Noise, Tricia Rose (1994) isolates three “stylistic continuities” (38) that typify most hip-hop music, one of which is flow. Rose tells us that “[r]appers speak of flow explicitly in lyrics, referring to an ability to move 5 easily and powerfully through complex lyrics as well as of the flow in the music” (39). This ability is also commonly called “riding the beat” and thus, when Nas tells us that his “pen rides the paper,” he gestures toward his ability to rap while introducing the car metaphor and speaking about his prowess at writing and delivering rhymes. Nas, in a sense, unites rapping (the oral) and writing (the literary) in the image of the mechanical car. Through the setting in place of the triple-pronged metaphor, this union also technologizes both his writing and his rapping.

Contemplating the metaphor from another angle, the pen becomes a stand-in for Nas himself. In actual fact, it is rappers themselves who ﬂow or ride the beat, but here the pen takes the place of Nas. More directly, the pen is Nas's actual voice. Nas corporealizes and personiﬁes the pen in the last line when he tells us that the act of writing actually warms his hand and also—if one takes the hand as a metonym—his body. Nas here asserts that he is a writer because he is a pen; he rides the beat just as his pen rides the paper. The image that Nas presents here is a worthwhile way to think through what one could call his larger project of combining orality and literacy. And it is through the oral expression of his rapping that he paradoxically asserts his debts to and reliance on the written word.

The concurrent and rushed nature of this metaphor—driving a car, writing rhymes, and rapping are seemingly jumbled together in the very small space of three lines—highlights the paradoxical nature of Nas's notion. Paradox, though, as I wrote above, should not be taken as evidence for Nas's incoherence but as fundamental to his poetry. Cleanth Brooks (1947) opens The Well Wrought Urn by stating that [f]ew of us are prepared to accept the statement that the language of poetry is the language of paradox. […] Yet there is a sense in which paradox is the language appropriate and inevitable to poetry. […] the truth which the poet utters can be approached only in terms of paradox. (3)

For Brooks, the way that a poet uses paradox is a major factor in his or her success; poems derive their power from their ability to employ paradox. Nas's paradox works in “One Time 4 Your Mind” precisely because he packs one poetic conceit on top of another in only three lines. Furthermore, the “truth” that Nas is getting at—namely, that he is a writer exactly through his prescription to and mastery of oral culture—can only be approached and explained through a turn toward paradox.

Illmatic's fourth song “The World Is Yours” is the most explicit and detailed exploration of Nas's conception of himself as a writer and his writing process. Nas sets the situation of the song in the first lines of the first verse. After getting drunk on Dom Perignon champagne that he consumed while watching the film Gandhi, Nas turns toward writing some rhymes. His output is voluminous and almost uncontrollable; “all the words [spill] pass the margins” of his notebook. But his actual style of writing in this inebriated creative process is not chaotic but the opposite. The prospect of holding the microphone has him “throbbin'”—pulsating abnormally but also with a regular rhythm—and his writing in his book of rhymes is the result of “mechanical movement.” This mechanical or technological nature of his writing is, as we have seen, something that was also present in “One Time 4 Your Mind.” This persistent figuration of his writing process as mechanical leads to another paradox; the creation of original material—in the context of hip-hop, the “thief's theme” that he is writing would probably be novel—through the processes of mechanical reproduction. In any case, the result of his inspiration can easily be comprehended by his audience. Also, he can easily flow (“understandable smooth shit”) to the material he produces. In other words, his lyrics succeed in actual performance by Nas, in the intended audience's reception and also as written text since the text's purpose is to lead to both of those results.

After exploring his writing style in the first few lines of this verse, Nas goes outside to face the world while drunk. He complicates his inebriation by also telling us that “[t]he fiend of hip-hop has got [him] stuck like a crack pipe.” Nas's altered state is then due not only to the champagne that he had been drinking, but also to hip-hop itself. This bicausal intoxication leads to his “mind activation, react like I'm facin' time like /“Pappy” Mason with pens I'm embracin'.” In a sense, these two lines reinforce what he has already established—intoxicants, whether champagne or hip- 6 hop, lead him to write rhymes—but it also interestingly counterposes the crime of “Pappy” Mason with the pen. Nas embraces the pen—and his mind that he aligns with the technology of writing—over the crime of Mason and the prison time that the lifestyle entails. Bicausal intoxication also resonates with and signifies upon W.E.B. DuBois's (1903) famous concept of “double consciousness.” In The Souls of Black Folk, DuBois declares double-consciousness to be a “sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others” (3). This sense of constant surveillance speaks to the situation of the song—Nas is soberly telling us about his own adventures while drunk—as well as his tendency to step outside himself to think through and expound upon the stories of his raps. In his lyrics, Nas looks at himself “through the eyes of others.”

At the conclusion of the verse, Nas tells us that, instead of desiring change in electoral politics like conscious artists such as Public Enemy, he is only concerned with making money. He ironically repeats the line “I'm out for presidents to represent me” twice. After both utterances, the line is challenged by an incredulous “Say what?” from an anonymous voice in the studio. He then corrects it by rapping, “I'm out for dead presidents to represent me” (emphasis added). This detachment from the active political process should not be seen as at all surprising. In Hip Hop America, Nelson George (1998) notes that “[h]ip hop is not a political movement in the usual sense. Its advocates don't elect public ofﬁcials. It doesn't present a systematic (or even original) critique of white world supremacy” (154). Instead, Nas's devotion to “dead presidents”—in the strictest sense, dollar bills—over “presidents” is actually a turn toward a sort of self-reliance (Nas's own money represents himself better than any president) in the Emersonian sense. In his essay “Self-Reliance,”Ralph Waldo Emerson (1950; orig. 1841) declares, “[t]o believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, – that is genius” (165). Nas desires to become self-reliant both in his ﬁnances and also in his mind and his poetic “genius”; Nas believes in nothing if not his own thought. There is a union here between his efforts as a writer of rhymes and his desire for money; they both lead to and are informed by his genius.

One of the most striking features of the song is the self-depiction of the solitary nature of his life. Despite the song's title, there is little to no sense of a greater community in “The World Is Yours,” only an impression of Nas himself. He emphasizes this point in the third verse when he raps: I'm the young city bandit, hold myself down single-handed For murder raps, I kick my thoughts alone, get remanded Born alone, die alone, no crew to keep my crown or throne I'm deep by sound alone, caved inside a thousand miles from home.

In three lines, Nas employs the word “alone” four times. He also rhymes two words at the end of the third and fourth lines with “alone,” purposefully deploying these words to highlight and probably exaggerate the solitary trope that runs through the song.

The presence and then overdetermination of Nas's aloneness works in concert with his positioning his writing process in “The World Is Yours.” Through the emphasis on his solitude, Nas states his credentials as a singular genius that does not need nor even has access to help. Indeed, he “[holds] himself down single-handed” in order to get “dead presidents to represent [himself].” It should be noted here that the singular, solitary writer figure that Nas is sketching would never need representation by an elected official who could not comprehend or appreciate the “murder raps” that Nas composes alone. Also, the line “I'm deep by sound alone” is important because Nas acknowledges here that it is only through his music and his raps (“sound alone”) that he can contribute or compose anything meaningful and insightful (“I'm deep”). Or, in other words, Nas can only create his “deep” and literary work through aural and oral means, rather than just through a text. The text only becomes “deep” when it is converted through his rapping into sound. In other words, Nas's writing only gains significance when it is technologized, which is a feature that we have observed in “One Time 4 Your Mind” and even earlier in “The World Is Yours.”

“One Love” presents us with a situation in which Nas is at first speaking to his friend in prison, then writing a letter to his friend, and finally wandering through the streets of his housing project. The dramatic premise of all three verses is that Nas is transmitting information but through different means; first, orally, then in a written fashion, and finally through a combination of both in the form of a narrative. I will focus on the first two verses because they offer a stark contrast between aspects of Nas as a writer and as a speaker. Nas immediately sets up the conceit of the first verse in his first lines:

What up, kid? I know shit is rough doing your bid When the cops came, you shoulda slid to my crib Fuck it black, no time for looking back, it's done.

After establishing here that he is speaking to a friend and probably a neighbor who has been incarcerated, Nas turns to relay information to his unnamed friend about a heated conversation that Nas had with the mother of his friend's child. He concludes that she is “a snake too / Fucking with the niggas from that fake crew that hate you.” He also relates information about who has been shot—“Jerome's niece on her way home from Jones Beach”—and who has started selling drugs, before giving his friend a hundred dollars and then leaving. During this verse, Nas also asks four questions but, due to the nature of the song where Nas is the only speaker, the friend is never concretely portrayed as providing answers to the queries.

7 In the second verse, Nas writes a letter to another friend in jail. Nas begins by telling him that “in New York the same shit is goin' on / The crack- heads stalking, loud-mouths is talking.” It is perhaps ironic that Nas would single out that the “loud-mouths is talking” since, as an emcee, all that he could be seen to be doing is speaking. But Nas positions himself quite forcefully throughout the album as a writer above and beyond his status as a talker. While his oral skills are considerable, it is Nas's skill with the pen that he emphasizes as really notable. Nas goes on to inform his friend about “the story yesterday [that he heard] when [he] was walking / The nigga you shot last year tried to appear like he hurtin' something.” This man apparently started to sell drugs on his friend's block and, worse, the friend has been betrayed by his now former partner. As Nas tells him, “[y]our man gave him your glock / And now they together, what up son, whatever.” Nas then turns to give his friend counsel and support about what he assumes is an attempted rape or murder that his friend has experienced in jail –“[l]ast time you wrote you said they tried you in the showers / But maintain when you come home the corner's ours”—before telling his friend about the money he gave his mother and then relaying information about his friend's brother's chances at being acquitted (“He might beat his case”). Nas concludes by soberly noting, “I hate it when your mum cries / It kinda wants to make me murder.”

In stark contrast to the first verse, the fact that the second verse does not feature any questions is immediately striking. This difference can be explained if one thinks through the two verses as examples of Nas as a speaker and then Nas as a writer. In the case of the first verse, Nas is in conversation with his friend. Although the friend never answers and he is never, due to the constraints of the verse, given the chance to speak, there is still the possibility that he could respond. Additionally, if one reads the first verse in more detail, it emerges that the friend could have responded to Nas's questions. That is, the lines that Nas raps after his questions could just as well be in response to an unheard answer as they are a continuation of the logic of the questions. In any case, the first verse is an example of Nas placing himself very explicitly into a community including someone else. In the second verse, however, Nas is alone as the solitary writer as in “The World Is Yours.” But here, instead of writing rhymes in his notebook, he is composing a letter to his friend. There is no need for Nas to ask his friend any questions or, to take it further, to involve anyone since Nas has the pen in his hand.

This solitary approach could be construed as quite strange since the overwhelming majority of Nas's material is concerned with the actions of the people in his home of the Queensbridge housing projects. Instead, Nas places a heavy emphasis on his isolation as a writer. There are at least two avenues to pursue in order to square this apparent contradiction. First, it is an example of the sort of poetic paradox that Cleanth Brooks (1947) stresses so forcefully in The Well Wrought Urn; Nas's poetic genius is reliant upon this paradox in that the listener/reader is surprised by this contradictory stance, which eventually leads to the truth. Second, a close reading reveals that there is no contradiction. It is the second path that I ﬁnd more fruitful and interesting.

Nas purposefully constructs this distance; while concerned with the actions of his community, he is not an actual participant in most of the crimes and injustices that he describes. Nas's raps are detailed and poetic observations of the street and street culture. He then could be seen as a kind of updated twenty-first century flâneur. Walter Benjamin (1973) tells us that “[t]he street becomes a dwelling for the flâneur; he is as much at home among the facades of houses as a citizen is in his four walls” (37). I do not want to push the comparison too far since the flâneur that Benjamin describes differs greatly from the street poet figure of Nas—definitely in time period, context, politics, social background, and especially race— but there is a sort of historical continuity here. Nas, like the flâneur, inhabits the street and turns it into poetry.

There is another resonance—the idea of the group in hip-hop—in Nas's purposeful construction of his solitary nature and distance from his community. Hip-hop culture has a central and powerful emphasis upon the group (also known as the posse, clique, or crew) over the individual. Can't Stop Won't Stop,Jeff Chang's (2005) excellent history of rap, traces this prominence in the initial stages of hip-hop and he notes that this stress in hip-hop is partly due to the subculture's prehistory in New York gang culture (7–65). Michael Eric Dyson comments that “the male relation becomes a fetish in hip-hop circles: hanging with ‘my boys,’ kicking it with ‘my crew,’ hustling with ‘my mens and them,’ and dying for ‘my niggas’” (120). Dyson names this emphasis on the collective as an “unapologetic intensity of devotion” which may “[evoke] at some level homoerotic union” (120). As for the last point, Dyson might be reading too much into the fierce collectivity of hip-hop but I think that these memorable words are important in that they express the deep significance of the crew. In the case of Nas's early work in Illmatic, what is most interesting is how this “unapologetic intensity of devotion” is expressed in written words (“The World Is Yours”), in letters to prison (“One Love”), and in his narratives (“N.Y. State of Mind”). While on first glance Nas may be seen as stepping away from the group in his lyrics, his writings actually function as his primary bridge to the wider community and to his posse. Nas's crew is mostly silent—the album features only one guest appearance, for example—because Nas speaks and writes on their behalf by creating and performing his lyrics. Nas expresses collective strength through self-reliance. That is, Nas's “intensity of devotion” to his crew paradoxically comes through in his rigorously personal observations of the street.

The most prominent of the drives behind Nas's observations is purely documentary. In an essay that ﬁrst appeared in the Village Voice,Ta-Nehisi Coates (2004) notes,

Illmatic[…] shunned all urges towards didactism or shock, instead opting for a wide-angle view of the Queensbridge projects. “N.Y. State of Mind,”“Memory Lane,” and “One Love” constitute a stark and striking black-and-white 8 photo album of Nas's black America (314).

Coates's image of the photo album suggests that Nas is only recording or documenting the “Black America” of the Queensbridge projects. Also, Coates is clear that Illmatic is not meant to be purely shocking or instructive—most likely in the sense that Public Enemy deﬁnitely are trying to teach—but the album is an observational text of the street. To varying degrees, all nine of Illmatic's songs are examples of Nas's observations rather than his participation in or aggrandizement of the violence and chaos of the housing projects. But it is the ﬁrst verse of “N.Y. State of Mind”—one of the songs that Coates mentions–that strikes me as the best and most instructive example.

9 “N.Y. State of Mind” consists of two very long 42-bar verses with a chorus that consists of only a repeated sample of a line rapped by Rakim. The overriding rhyme scheme used for most of the song is intricate and virtuosic. For every two lines, Nas rhymes at least three words. The following lines are a typical example of this rhyme scheme with its combination of interior and end rhyme: “Niggas be runnin' through the block shootin' / Time to start a revolution, catch a body head for Houston (emphasis added).” One effect of this scheme is that the words that rhyme are usually of relevance to each other. That is, due to the rhyme scheme, the meanings of the three rhyming words are put into conversation with each other even though the words are separated by other words. One can observe this in the above example of the rhyme scheme. Shootin', revolution, and Houston are all interrelated; the ﬁrst refers to the physical action, the second to the desired larger aim, and the third to the location. Another example is when, employing distorted pronunciation to fashion a slant rhyme, Nas rhymes “pain,”“cocaine,”“M-16,” and “extreme” in the opening lines of the verse. All are related to and comment on each other. Also, there are moments when this scheme breaks down and Nas reverts to more typical end-rhymed lines. These are points that either break up the possible monotony of the scheme or they emphasize the meaning of the lines that do not ﬁt in this typical scheme. The exceptions from the rhyme scheme thus stand out from the rest.

The verse opens with Nas describing his own credentials as a “[m]usician inflictin' composition / Of pain” before modulating into a description, notably using the exception of only end-rhymed lines, of the time when “[o]nce they caught off guard, the Mac-10 was in the grass and / I ran like a cheetah with thoughts of an assassin.” Nas finishes the story within the verse and then turns to, as it were, taking snap shots for his photo album of the projects by describing people and events that he observes or has been told about. Nas's story is then surrounded by his observations of first himself and then of the streets. The story should be understood not as the overriding concern or point of the verse but just as an example of his creative ability to sketch stories (“see with the pen I'm extreme”) based on observations made from and about the streets. Additionally, Nas only has “thoughts of an assasin” and not that he actually inhabits a praxis of homicide. Nas himself confirms this reading when, in the first line of the second verse, he raps that he has only “[b]e[en] dreaming that I'm a gangster – drinkin' Moets, holdin' Tecs.”

The ﬁnal lines of the ﬁrst verse from “N.Y. State of Mind” are the most telling in both form and content. Nas ends the verse with the following iconic lines:

It drops deep as it does in my breath I never sleep‘cause sleep is the cousin of death Beyond the walls of intelligence, life is deﬁned I think of crime when I'm in a New York state of mind (emphasis added).

The rhyme scheme in the first two lines quoted here never occurs in the rest of the verse. The exceptional quality of these lines highlights their 10 importance and also sets up the primacy of the meaning of the final two lines in the verse. In the case of the latter, the use of this different rhyme scheme acts as a sort of turn in the verse in a similar fashion as the poetic device of the turn in a sonnet. The lines thus refocus the attention of the listener and prepare one for the final two lines that signify a sort of mission statement for Nas that defines both the album (“N.Y. State of Mind” is preceded by a brief introductory skit but it is the first song on the album) and his overall approach. In the final two lines of the verse, Nas rhymes the words “defined,”“crime,” and “mind” and these words are very much in productive transit with each other. Both Nas's larger project of observation rather than participation and his solitary approach to writing are very much occurring inside his own mind and the subject that he is chronicling is mainly crime. Furthermore, by telling us that this occurs “beyond the walls of intelligence,” Nas gestures toward earlier lines in the verse about his writing process as “mechanical movement” while concurrently alluding to the genius and virtuosity of his writing and rhyming. To sum up, he is telling us then that he is outside the boundaries of regular intelligence—and, notably, also beyond their accompanying mainstream discourses of power—and that his mind is defined by crime. Furthermore, only Nas himself is outside these “walls of intelligence” and this is the reason why he vigorously stresses in other songs (most notably in “The World Is Yours”) his status as an exceptional artist and, above all, writer in and of the oral culture of hip-hop.

Perhaps it would be productive to think of Nas's Illmatic as being in conversation with Roland Barthes' (2001)“The Death of the Author.” In clear contrast to Barthes, Nas clearly believes in the Author. During the chorus of “Made You Look,” a later song from 2003, he taunts the listener, calling all of us just a “slave to a page in [his] rhyme book.” He asserts his ownership and his authority of his texts over his listeners and readers. If the Author is dead, then the listener/reader could never be enslaved to Nas's “rhyme book.” Barthes tells us that “[t]he reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's unity lies not in its origins but in its destination” (224). Nas instead stresses the importance of the origin over the destination in his self-conception of his writing process. This reassertion of the power of the Author is one of the results of Nas' central paradox in which he positions himself as a writer in the overwhelmingly oral context of hip-hop culture. Notes 1 All transcriptions of rap lyrics in this article are by the author. I would like to acknowledge the helpful suggestions, editorial assistance, and encouraging words provided by Andrew DuBois and my fellow students in his American Popular Lyric graduate seminar at the University of Toronto in 2006. 2 This difficulty in interpretation or reading of graffiti arts has been used by rapper Common as a simile for his own unreadable expression in “The Sun God” from DJ Hi-Tek's (2001) album Hi-Teknology. Common raps that he is “hard to read like graffiti.” 3 There are, of course, exceptions, most notably Public Enemy. But neither the original release of Illmatic in 1994 or the 2004 “platinum edition” rerelease contained a lyrics booklet. 4 Enjambment is a literary term that describes when a phrase or sentence flows from one line to the next without a pause. Nas's lines are marked by the musical bars. That is, one line corresponds to one bar and an enjambment occurs when Nas' line continues through more than one bar without a pause, which usually signifies a period. 5 For example, on “When I Burn” from the Ultramagnetic MCs’ (1996) album Critical Beatdown, Kool Keith rhymes: 6 Howard “Pappy” Mason was charged and then convicted in the late 1980s of, as the August 12, 1988 New York Times reports, “operating a $20 million drug organization that was responsible for at least 10 murders” (Kerr 1988: B2). The gang was also implicated in the homicide of a police officer. 7 One can assume that this friend is someone other than the person that Nas speaks to in the first verse. Nas never actually explicitly declares this to be true but he also never mentions anything that arises during the first verse in the second verse. Also, the two verses address different aspects of prison and street life.

8 Coates's essay has also been anthologized in Raquel Cepeda's And It Don't Stop: The Best America Hip-Hop Journalism of the Last 25 Years, which is my source for the piece. 9 Sixteen bars is the standard length of a verse in a typical rap song.

10 This importance is further underlined when Nas employs the same lines, with minor changes, at the same point in the second verse:

Works Cited

1. Top of page 2. Works Cited Barthes, Roland. The Death of the Author. The Book History Reader. Ed. DavidFinkelstein and AlistairMcCleery. New York : Routledge, 2001. 221–24.

Benjamin, Walter. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. Trans. Harry Zohn. London : NLB, 1973. Birchmeier, Jason. Nas: Biography. AllMusic. 24 February 2008. . Brooks, Cleanth. The Well Wrought Urn. New York : Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1947.

Chang, Jeff. Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. New York : St. Martin's P, 2005.

Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Keepin' It Unreal: $elling the Myth of Black Male Violence Long Past Its Expiration Date. And It Don't Stop: The Best American Hip-Hop Journalism of the Last 25 Years. Ed. RaquelCepeda. New York : Faber & Faber, 2004. 310–18.

DuBois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folks: Essays and Sketches. Chicago : A.C. McClurg & Co., 1903.

Dyson, Michael Eric. Know What I Mean? Reﬂections on Hip-Hop. New York : Basic Civitas Books, 2007. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Self-Reliance. Selected Prose and Poetry. Ed. Reginald L.Cook. New York : Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1950. 165–92. George, Nelson. Hip Hop America. New York : Penguin, 1998.

Hi-Tek and Common. “The Sun God. Hi-Teknology. Rawkus Records, 2001. Kerr, Peter. 30 Arrested in Drug Sweeps: Target is Gang Linked to Killing of an Ofﬁcer. New York Times December August 1988, B1+. Nas. Illmatic. Columbia Records, 1994.

Nas. “Made You Look. God's Son. Columbia Records, 2002. “Nas: The Mature Voice of Hip-Hop. MSNBC.com 17 February 2008. 4 January 2005. . Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Middletown , CT : Wesleyan UP, 1994.

Ultramagnetic MCs. Critical Beatdown. Roadrunner Records, 1996.