Its one of the most influencial and important albums in Hip Hop History but now Illmatic will be turned into a book by scholar, author and activist Dr. Michael Eric Dyson.
Speaking to Allhiphop, Dyson said
“Every song on Illmatic will be analyzed, interpreted and then re-articulated in a kind of intellectual sense from his own base in Hip Hop and we’re trying to deal with that seriously,”
But now one of the album’s producers and mentor to Nas, the legendary Large Professor has chimed in on Dyson’s idea to pen the Illmatic book
“It means a lot. That’s what we were working for though … It’s finally paying off. It was a lot of hard work put into getting that album how it was – even getting Nas to that point. It’s finally payin’ off. Sometimes it’s a delayed reaction with things. Back in the days, my father would tell me, ‘You’re ahead of your time.’ I didn’t know what that meant. Sometimes that’s a good thing and a bad thing. You get a grasp on it, and you understand what it is, and you realize it.”
Dyson is a fantastic writer. I read his last book ‘Know What I Mean’, which had Jay-Z and Nas writing the Introduction and Epilogue. Cant wait to see how this one turns out
