This week to distract myself from how fucked our lives are, I spent some time diving into Nas' 1994 classic 'Illmatic'. The album was huge for me when I discovered it in my teens, but this week I dug into some old reviews and interviews from when the album came out, and also went back and watched 'Wild Style', the 1982 movie sampled in the opening track of the album. That led me onto 'Style Wars' from 1983, and I feel like with those two, and a bit more knowledge of Nas' life growing up in the Queensbridge Projects in NYC in the 70s and 80s, I have a new understanding of where this album came from. I never really thought about it too much, I just knew I loved it, so it was cool to dig in a little.