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Music consumption and discussion in 2024 bears little resemblance to fandom from one decade ago, let alone three or four. Old songs gain new life on TikTok; AI creates original music trained on data from the world’s most popular artists; drill rappers post a song on YouTube on Tuesday, and by Friday it’s thumping in the dormitories of elite colleges.
Many have considered how this digital ecosystem influences the buying and selling of music. But a related question has mostly escaped inquiry: How does it impact the way music is honored and remembered? Few albums demonstrate the stark contrasts in music appreciation as well as Nas’ 1994 genre-defining Illmatic, widely recognized as one of the most important albums ever made.
Today, the 30th anniversary of its release, offers an opportunity to reflect not only on the album, but on how the modern music industry and the technology that drives it (streaming, social media, artificial intelligence) has changed the landscape in a manner that may help to preserve its legacy.
Illmatic’s release initially flew under the mainstream radar. There were no major release parties covered by MTV or VH1, no cover articles in Rolling Stone or splashy features in The New York Times, Nas’ hometown paper. It sold just a few thousand copies in its first week, and didn’t achieve platinum status until 2001, years after his sophomore effort (1996’s It Was Written) had done so.
In music circles, though, praise for Illmatic arrived almost instantly. For example, it secured one of Source’s elusive “5-mic” ratings, designated for instant “hip-hop classics.” In the decades since, it has steadily accumulated accolades. Illmatic is high on many all-time greatest albums lists (in any genre), and in 2021, was the first hip-hop album inducted into the Library of Congress.
These acknowledgements tell only part of the story, as its informal influence is far greater. So highly regarded is Illmatic that the album’s title is now used to describe a musician’s defining opus (One might ask: “Is Mama’s Gun Erykah Badu’s Illmatic?”). Its importance even transcends music: The album’s famed cover—featuring Nasir Jones as a child, with a photo of the Queensbridge Houses as the backdrop—has inspired visual artists.
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For years, scholars and fans have examined Illmatic in search of an explanation for what made it work. The answers are multiple, but converge on a few factors. For one, there is timing. Illmatic is one of the defining albums of hip-hop’s unofficial golden age (somewhere between 1988 and 1996), when the art form achieved enormous commercial success, geographical (and sonic) diversity, a global footprint, and an large influx of talented lyricists, producers, and tastemakers, almost all raised during hip-hop’s earliest days.
This played out in Illmatic’s production style, featuring an ensemble cast of producers that created an expansive yet cohesive soundscape. Then, of course, there are the lyrics. Nas’ words were a magic elixir, a blend of Kool G Rap, Rakim, the Last Poets, and William Shakespeare. It was a mix listeners had never heard before (and arguably, haven’t since).
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While all of these creative inspirations drove much of the impact of Illmatic, the album also derives power from the fact that it is an album in the truest sense. Albums are titled, self-contained curations of songs, often connected by a conceptual or sonic thread. The album was formalized as a unit in vinyl many decades ago, dictating the format’s size and scope.
Which is to say, the length of an album—often around a dozen songs, each several minutes long—wasn’t an organic artistic decision, but an industrial and technological one. The structure of the album has outlived the technological constraints of vinyl. Today, albums could be composed of a single, 100-minute song (or 10 of them).
Yet, by and large, the standard album persists: Billboard reports the best performing songs and albums; the Grammy for Album of the Year is arguably its most prestigious prize; the term “discography” is often summarized by a musician’s list of albums. As a formal category, the album is here to stay. But the album is also dead—or has at least been forever changed. And the culprit is the very same sort of technological progress that created it.
Music was one of the media forms where the power of digital space and the internet were immediately apparent. The birth of Napster in 1999 was a defining moment for young Silicon Valley, an era when twentysomethings made fortunes based on (sometimes small) digital tweaks on existing models of property and commerce.
In the case of Napster, the main currency was the MP3 file, usually encoding individual songs, often traded illegally. This created the user landscape that made the birth of Apple’s iTunes store in 2003 possible, a digital marketplace where music could be purchased in a manner similar to how it was traded on Napster. Overnight, the album as an organizing principle became an option. Yes, one could purchase Madvillain’s Madvillainy as a whole—or just grab their favorite songs. With a few clicks and little effort, anyone could transform their music-listening experience into an individual song experience.
The growth of streaming ran in parallel to the birth of social media and influencer culture. In the early 2000s, artists and fans owned less than they ever had before. The barriers to entry became lower than ever. The A&Rs and industry gatekeepers lost power, and almost everyone with the necessary resources could become a successful artist, with a song or album available for streaming in seconds thanks to platforms like SoundCloud and Bandcamp. MCs could release mixtapes on file-sharing sites like Megaupload. Those without historical access had an opportunity, while established artists needed to evolve.
The faux-constraints of vinyl were vaporized, and the album was no longer a necessary unit. In this world, organized collections of songs are less important than piles of good individual ones. That’s not a bad thing—only different, and fit for a different business model.
This analysis isn’t an exercise in “Make Albums Great Again.” There are still plenty of good albums—anticipation for Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter and today’s Tortured Poets Department from Taylor Swift attest to the format’s cultural impact. Rather, this is a call to consider how technology will impact music creation and distribution in the future. This conversation is especially relevant for anxieties regarding the use of artificial intelligence, particularly in hip-hop, which uses words in a way no other form of music has.
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Which brings us back to Illmatic. It seems unlikely any LLM could produce the lyrical virtuosity and inventiveness of “N.Y. State of Mind,” but it also seems unlikely, in the TikTok age, that the album could have been made in such relative seclusion. In 1994, there were no Instagram Live videos from the recording studio with song snippets. There were no podcasts where Large Professor (one of Illmatic’s producers) could leak secrets about the project. Part of Illmatic’s legend was in how it came from out of nowhere, and slowly demanded everyone’s attention. Today, there is no such thing as coming out of nowhere and slowly doing anything. In milliseconds, everything is everywhere.
On the consumption side, while Illmatic did benefit from prerelease buzz, it was not an immediate commercial success. Its appeal grew over the span of years, slowly accumulating listeners and fans. This is out-of-step with models of today. Outside of a few artists at the very top of the industry (Beyoncé, Drake), artists who are trying to catch on must play the numbers game: Release music in a steady manner with the hope that something goes viral, around which they can build a fan base. In 1994 there was no virality. Playing the long game was a responsible, often effective business strategy.
Lastly, there is the manner that Illmatic was discussed in. This might be where the differences between 1994 and 2024 are most apparent. The early ’90s had no hip-hop message boards. There was no social media. The legend of Illmatic was built from street corner to street corner, person to person, party to party.
The arguments of 1994—whether Illmatic was better than Snoop Doggy Dogg’s Doggystyle and Wu-Tang Clan’s Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), a pair of cherished debut albums from 1993—were intense. But they didn’t result in trolling or doxxing. Only bruised egos and exhausted vocal chords. And most critically, almost everyone we argued with was someone we knew: a neighbor, family member, classmate, or coworker.
Music debates now take place in front of an audience of billions, 99.9 percent of whom we don’t (and will never) share a conversation with. Music opinions are no longer slow-cooked over the course of multiple trips (and Walkman listens) on the 1 train. Now they’re fried and processed on the (often) toxic stoves of social media timelines. In this world, reverence for music looks and feels different, enough for us to doubt whether there’s breathing room for the sort of appreciation that made the legend of Illmatic.
Technology changes everything. We’ve heard, and now tell, stories of America’s past that sound apocryphal to the young and unfamiliar: the milkman, the telegraph, the rotary phone, the eight-track. Soon we may say something similar about the album—that there was a time when music was made in bundles that gave listeners a cohesive sonic experience. And it is this milieu that gave us some of the best art of our time, from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band to Purple Rain to Illmatic.
The rise of social media, streaming, and artificial intelligence has forced creatives to rethink everything about what we make. And oddly, it has helped to solidify Illmatic as one of one—a relic that may survive the test of time and the disruptive possibilities of the future.
