Twenty years later, the music of Nas' seminal debut album, Illmatic, is still reverberating—and now the world is getting a chance to peel back the curtain and look inside the creative process that led to songs like "N.Y. State of Mind" and "The World Is Yours."
In these two clips (one above and one below) from Nas: Time Is Illmatic, the producers behind those songs, DJ Premier and Pete Rock respectively, talk about how they arrived at the understated rhythms and sounds that have been banging out of speakers in Brooklyn ever since. "It gotta make you do this," Premier says of "N.Y. State of Mind" while bobbing his shoulders back and forth. "And that made you do that."
Time Is Illmatic opens in New York and Los Angeles today, plays one night only in select theaters nationwide on Oct. 2, and will be available on VOD and iTunes a day later on Oct. 3. For full info on the doc—which every hip hop fan has to see—click here.
