Table of contents

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• Related book: Born to Use Mics: Reading Nas's Illmatic
• General thoughts
  
  • The good
    • The main attraction of his rapping style, as far as I can tell, is that he has one (or more!) internal rhyme(s) on nearly _every_single_line_ without it sounding like complete gibberish, which is obviously an incredible accomplishment.
    • He's also able to make his lyrics sound dramatic / not ridiculous.
    • His flow is also–while not perfect (see "The bad" below)–is overall undeniably very good, maybe even 'excellent' when compared against later artists, with the caveat that this is a different style of rapping with different constraints that he's holding himself to.
    • He doesn't have all of his rhymes at the end of the line and the same rhythm on a significant percentage of his lines, which was a big problem with earlier rap.
    • He also doesn't skimp on the lyrics the way some other rappers will, filling the time with repetitions of the chorus or variations on the beat/melody. All of his songs have a lot of original lyrics.
  • The bad
    • Illmatic seems pretty hyped, and it may have been revolutionary at the time it was released, but I don't think it holds up when compared to Biggie's / Tupac's / Eminem's best albums/songs.
    • He will sometimes pause in the middle of a sentence, which is something less-good rappers are known to do and really hurts my feeling of immersion into the lyrics.
    • He will sometimes flip his sentence-structure, which makes it harder to understand, similar to when he pauses in the middle of a sentence.
    • His producer(s) clearly aren't as good as Biggie's / Eminem's / Tupac's. He often doesn't have fun / interesting melodies. "The World is Yours",  "Memory Lane", "Represent", and "It Ain't Hard to Tell" are exceptions.
    • He doesn't alternate long (1/8th-note) and normal (1/16th-note) durations on his vowels the way Biggie / Tupac / Eminem do. So it sounds less varied.
    • He uses words / phrases that are hard to understand:
      • "Visualizin' the realism of life and actuality"
        • This is by someone else rapping a verse on one of Nas's songs, but the verse was written in Nas's style.
      • "Beef with housin' police, release scriptures that's maybe Hitler's" ← What does "scriptures that's maybe Hitler's" mean?
    • I think he's so focused on getting internal rhymes that it forces him to use awkward sentence construction, which makes it harder to follow what he's saying. IIRC Eminem has the same issue in his internal-rhyme-heavy songs.
    • He has a LOT of references/slang in his rhymes, which make it harder to follow than Biggie / Tupac / Eminem lyrics, even though those guys also use slang / references.
      • "Before a blunt, I take out my fronts" ← OK, in hindsight, I guess 'fronts' refers to his grill.
      • "That's like Malcolm X, catchin the Jungle Fever"
      • "I'll pull a number like a pager"
      • "I'm an ace when I face the bass"
      • "40-side is the place that is giving me grace"
      • "Nas will catch wreck"
      • "And told my little man that I'm a go cyprose" ← Even urbandictionary doesn't know what 'cyprose' means.
    • It's hard to say what a lot of his songs are about.
    • He doesn't have any skits or other things to mix up the flow of his album and give his listeners' brains a breather between songs.
    • A few too many references to Moet (IMO) in the second half of the album.
• Song-specific thoughts
  • The World Is Yours
    • The flow, rhymes, chorus, and melody/beat on this are sick.
    • But it's still hard to understand the ideas he's actually conveying with his words.
    Halftime
    • Forgettable :/
    • He says "slaaave ships" in exactly the same way that Biggie would 5 Later: IMO they would've done better to slow down the song a bit to make the lyrics easier to follow.  I enjoyed the lyrics a lot more when I played it at 75% speed on YouTube and could actually follow the lyrics.  75% felt a little slow, the ideal may be ~80-90% of the original speed.  But I do agree the accompaniment sounds good at a faster speed.  On the other hand, if the idea is that people are going to be listening to the song many times, it may make sense to have it at a faster speed.
  • Halftime
    • Forgettable :/
    • He says "slaaave ships" in exactly the same way that Biggie would 5 months later on "Ready to Die". He also then rhymes it with "clips", which is what Biggie ended up doing.
    • On my second listen, with the lyrics in front of me for both the first and second listen, I ended up with the impression that the main idea of this song is "I'm a great rapper".
    • This song also has a sample that I'm sure I've heard on another song, and I feel it was most likely a Biggie song (which was almost certainly released after this song). It may have been a commonly-used sample. You can hear it looping from 2:41 to 3:01. It sounds to me like a trumpet.
    • Later: Listening to this track on its own, without playing the entire album, I like the accompaniment.  Maybe the accompaniment sounds samey if the listener is listening to the entire album at once?
  • Memory Lane
    • Good loop/melody/beat.
  • One Love
    • I think this may be my favorite song on the album, despite it not having the most 'fun' / catchy beat / melody / sample.
    • I think the first verse of this song may be my favorite verse of the album.
    • This song actually has an easy-to-follow concept: someone writing a series of letters to their very-close friend / partner-in-crime in prison.
    • Eminem's "Stan" feels a lot like this song (obviously in concept, but also in execution), except with a lot more emotion in it.
  • One Time 4 Your Mind
    • I can't say what this song is supposed to be about.
  • Represent
    • This has a good loop/melody/beat. I immediately recognized it; this may be the most popular song on the album.
    • The concept is somewhat easy to understand: it's about his behavior in his hood.
  • It Ain't Hard To Tell
    • This has one of the better loops/melodies on the album.
    • He somewhat-weirdly combines a downplayed/quiet sample of the most-memorable portion of Michael Jackson's "Human Nature" with another very-prominent "DA-da-da-da-da" sample.
    • Can't say what the concept of this song is beyond "I'm a good rapper", and I had to reread the lyrics to be sure of that much.

The Notorious B.I.G.

1994 - Ready to Die

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• at the end of "Me & My Bitch" he says he started rapping at around age 18, but if you watch the video on YouTube, it says he's 17, and he's already good. And in the video he suggests he's been rapping since 13.
  

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• he varies his emotional tone; sometimes he's angry, other times he's not as angry
  

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• he varies the speed with which he talks
  

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• they do a great job of filling up the sound space with various sounds. one of the early songs in particular does a great job of this. it's really just like a christmas tree. but he also varies this; "One More Chance" empties out the space. It seems like they load up the sound space to add more energy into the song. For example, Lil Wayne's "How to Love" is relatively sparse of sounds.
  

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• a big part of the appeal is how unusual of a character he presents; it's just like There Will Be Blood or No Country For Old Men. His accent is part of what makes him seem exotic. Another trait is the way he responds to things; he responds differently than the listener would.
  

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• on The What, Method Man splits a rhyme in half, pausing before finishing it: "I'm not a gentle--man, I'm a method man" It doesn't sound good.
  

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• he uses "and stuff" a lot.
  

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• somehow the quality of the production on "Respect" and "Friend of Mine" sounds worse.
  

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• he's got songs that span many different emotions that people would feel: aggression towards someone, trying to pick up women, feeling depressed, etc.

13. Big Poppa

Tempo: 84.52 bpm
Structure: 3 8-couplet-sized stanzas of rapping divided by the chorus. But at the end you have Puffy talking instead of anyone rapping, and in the first stanza Biggie does a triplet followed by a singlet, and then for the singlet and the next couplet has the lyrics bleeding into the next couplet.

14. Respect

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• I think this is one of the worse songs on the album, but I can't quite articulate why...
  

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• • The melody is less interesting

16. Unbelievable

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• Verse 3 has some lines with awkward rhythm in it.

17. Suicidal Thoughts

Notes from 2017.07.10

• This album is just about twice as long as Illmatic, although it does contain several non-rap intros/skits/interludes.
• The concept of each of his songs is very easy to understand.
• Biggie sometimes uses hard-to-decipher slang, but much less frequently than Nas:
  • That's my word, nigga even try to bogart
• He'll make slight changes to common words:
  • I guess to get his life tooken
• Things Done Changed
  • The production plays with the stereo. It has some samples/audio play from the left side, and other audio playing from the right.
  • The melody is interesting.
  • The song has multiple samples of other people speaking.
• Machine Gun Funk
  • Great, great loop/melody
  • The concept of this song is harder to understand. It seems to be about how he is now a rapper, and has given up his past life, but is still capable of violence.
• Warning
  • Good loop/melody.
  • Very easy-to-understand concept.
• Ready to Die
  • The concept seems to be the same as Eminem's 'Rock Bottom': I need money and I'm going to steal to get it. But Biggie's delivery doesn't convey the same desperation.

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