Oct 31, 2026 · Album review · 13 min read

Nas “Illmatic”: Producers by Song, Samples, Tracklist & Meaning

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Released on April 19, 1994, Nas’ debut put five of New York’s best producers behind one 20-year-old from Queensbridge. Here is who made every beat, what they sampled and why it still matters.

On April 19, 1994, a 20-year-old from the Queensbridge Houses released his first album on Columbia Records. Nas called it Illmatic: ten songs, under 40 minutes, and five of the best producers in New York behind him. More than three decades later it is still the album people point to when they argue about the greatest rap record ever made.

This guide is written from a producer’s side of the booth: who made each beat, what records they sampled, how the most famous loops were built and why the whole thing still sounds so tight.

Short answer: who produced Illmatic?

Illmatic was produced by DJ Premier (three songs), Large Professor (three), Pete Rock (one), Q-Tip (one) and L.E.S. (one), with Nas co-producing “Life’s a Bitch” and producing the intro with Faith Newman. Almost every beat is built on 1969–1982 jazz, soul and funk: Joe Chambers and Donald Byrd on “N.Y. State of Mind”, Ahmad Jamal on “The World Is Yours”, the Heath Brothers on “One Love” and Michael Jackson on “It Ain’t Hard to Tell”. It was one of the first rap albums to put several star producers on one record, and it made that the norm.

Illmatic producers by song

This is the table most people are looking for: every track, who produced it and the main records it samples.

Producer credits from the album notes as listed on Wikipedia; samples checked on WhoSampled on October 31, 2026. Years are the ones WhoSampled lists for each original release. Several tracks use more sources than shown here.

How Illmatic came together

Nas was already a name in New York before he had a deal. At 15 he met Large Professor, who put him on the first verse of Main Source’s “Live at the Barbeque” (1991), a posse cut built on the drums of Bob James’ “Nautilus”; we tell that story in our Bob James “Nautilus” samples guide. His first solo song, “Halftime”, came out in 1992 on the soundtrack of the film Zebrahead. Even so, labels like Cold Chillin’ and Def Jam passed on him. In May 1992 his best friend and DJ, Willy “Ill Will” Graham, was shot and killed in Queensbridge, a moment Nas later called a wake-up call.

The door opened through MC Serch of 3rd Bass. After Nas rapped on Serch’s “Back to the Grill”, Serch took his demo to Faith Newman, an A&R at Sony, who had been looking for Nas for a year and a half. Serch became executive producer and started calling producers. According to Large Professor, he worked as a kind of second executive producer too, connecting Nas with Q-Tip, Pete Rock and DJ Premier. L.E.S., a DJ from Nas’ own neighborhood, completed the team.

Some details from the sessions:

• “Halftime” came first. Large Professor said it was the first song finished for the album and the first one to reach radio. Busta Rhymes wanted the beat before Nas took it.
• “N.Y. State of Mind” was written on the spot. DJ Premier built the beat from scratch while Nas watched, then Nas wrote his verse in the room. The line “I don’t know how to start this” stayed on the record: Premier counted him in and he delivered the verse in one take.
• “Represent” was Premier’s first song with Nas. WhoSampled cites a Premier interview where he says they cut two versions of “Represent” before recording “N.Y. State of Mind”.
• “One Time 4 Your Mind” was made live. Nas already had the rhymes and asked Large Professor to “hook something up” in the studio.
• “Life’s a Bitch” is the only song with a guest rapper. AZ said he thought he sounded terrible on it; the verse built his career. Nas’ father, jazz musician Olu Dara, plays the cornet solo that closes it.

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DJ Premier on the night Nas recorded “N.Y. State of Mind” in one take · Genius

Illmatic samples: the records behind each beat

“N.Y. State of Mind” (DJ Premier): Joe Chambers and Donald Byrd

The dark piano that runs through the song comes from Joe Chambers’ “Mind Rain”, from his album Double Exposure. The high, eerie guitar notes at the start come from Donald Byrd’s “Flight Time”, and the drums from Kool & the Gang’s “N.T.”. Premier scratches in a Rakim line from “Mahogany” for the hook. WhoSampled cites a Mass Appeal interview where Premier says Nas helped pick the Joe Chambers record. Today the song has been sampled in more than 100 other tracks.

“The World Is Yours” (Pete Rock): Ahmad Jamal

Pete Rock, a big fan of the pianist Ahmad Jamal, could not get a five-second piece of Jamal’s “I Love Music” (1970) out of his head. As he told Okayplayer, he looped it on his E-mu SP-1200 and sped it up to hear how it sounded without the original drums; once the loop was right, he said the rest of the beat “wasn’t too hard”. He has said he made it in under ten minutes, in his studio, The Basement, and Nas asked him to sing the hook. The title phrase comes from Scarface; the “It’s yours” vocal is T La Rock. Tomorrow’s crate digging goes deep into the Ahmad Jamal record behind it.

“It Ain’t Hard to Tell” (Large Professor): Michael Jackson

Large Professor built the closer on the intro of Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature”, with the horns of Kool & the Gang’s “N.T.” and drums from Stanley Clarke’s “Slow Dance”. He told Complex the sample was easier because Nas and Michael Jackson were both on Columbia’s side of Sony, and he described the track as a “hood bottle poppin’ song”. Faith Newman pushed it as the single that would introduce the album, and it became the most sampled song on Illmatic: WhoSampled lists more than 200 tracks that use it.

“One Love” (Q-Tip): the Heath Brothers

Large Professor took Nas to Q-Tip’s house to hear beats. When Nas heard this one, he reportedly said, “That’s it right there.” Q-Tip used the double bass and piano of the Heath Brothers’ “Smilin’ Billy Suite Pt. II” (1975), and the title comes from a Whodini song. Nas wrote it as letters to friends in prison. If you know Q-Tip’s own work, compare it with our Low End Theory review: the same love for upright bass, used for a darker story.

“Memory Lane”, “Represent” and the rest

DJ Premier’s other two beats are just as revealing. “Memory Lane (Sittin’ in da Park)” loops the organ and voices of Reuben Wilson’s “We’re in Love” and scratches in Biz Markie and Craig G of the Juice Crew, a nod to the hip hop history of Queens. “Represent” is the odd one out: instead of jazz or soul, it uses Lee Erwin’s theatre-organ music for the 1924 silent film The Thief of Bagdad. Large Professor’s “Halftime” mixes Average White Band, a Japanese cast recording of the musical Hair and Gary Byrd. The intro, “The Genesis”, layers the sound of a train, dialogue from Wild Style and Nas’ own “Live at the Barbeque” verse playing faintly underneath.

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Sample Breakdown: Nas – N.Y. State of Mind · Tracklib

Producer’s corner: what Illmatic teaches about making beats

The beats on Illmatic are simple on paper: a loop, a break, a scratch. What makes them work is the choices. These are the lessons I take from it as a producer:

• One idea, played with feeling. Pete Rock’s “I Love Music” loop is five seconds long. He didn’t chop it into twenty pieces; he found the right section, sped it up and let it ride. The skill is in finding the moment in the record that already sounds like a song.
• Mood over flash. Spin described the beats as subdued and slightly downcast. Premier, Large Pro and Q-Tip each kept their sound, but all of them left space for the voice. Nas raps over 40 bars on “N.Y. State of Mind” without a chorus to rest on, and the beat never gets in his way.
• Drums from somewhere else. Most tracks take the melody from one record and the drums from another (Kool & the Gang under Joe Chambers, Stanley Clarke under Michael Jackson). That is how you get a dusty jazz loop to knock like a rap record.
• Scratches as a hook. Premier’s choruses are scratched vocal snippets, not sung hooks. It ties the song to the history of the music it comes from.
• The machine of the era. Pete Rock made his beat on the E-mu SP-1200, the same sampler on which Large Professor learned to make beats from his mentor Paul C. Its short sample time and gritty 12-bit sound pushed producers toward short loops and hard drums, which is a big part of this album’s sound.

How to try it today: I produce on an Akai MPC Live III, and an Illmatic-style exercise is a good way to learn any sampler. Take one short phrase from a jazz record, set it as a loop, put a break from a different record under it, and filter the loop’s low end so the kick and bass have room. Our step-by-step guide on how to chop samples on an MPC covers the loop part, and how to sample vinyl covers getting the record in.

Songs that sampled Illmatic

Illmatic went on to become a sample source itself. Nas sampled his own hooks on later albums, and Big L, Eminem, Joey Bada$$ and Logic all borrowed lines from it. A few examples from WhoSampled:

The album has also been covered whole: Fashawn rapped over its beats on Ode to Illmatic (2010), and Elzhi recorded Elmatic (2011) with the band Will Sessions replaying the music live.

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Nas – The World Is Yours (Official HD Video)

What does Illmatic mean?

In an early interview, Nas said the title was a nod to an incarcerated friend called Illmatic Ice, and that the word means “beyond ill”: the ultimate. Later he described it as “supreme ill. It’s as ill as ill gets.” The vinyl and cassette made the idea of place literal: instead of side A and side B, the two sides are called “40th Side North” and “41st Side South”, after the streets that frame the Queensbridge Houses.

The Illmatic album cover

The cover is a photo of Nas at about seven years old, superimposed on a city block. The childhood picture was taken after his father, Olu Dara, came home from an overseas tour; the photography is credited to Danny Clinch and the art direction to Aimee Macauley. Nas said that age was when he started to see a future for himself beyond the projects, and that the afro was a nod to young Michael Jackson. The first idea was very different: a picture of Nas holding Jesus in a headlock, after a line in “Live at the Barbeque”. It became the first hip hop album cover with a child on it and a template for many others.

Why is Illmatic so important?

Four reasons come up again and again, from critics and from rappers:

• The writing. Nas packed multi-syllable internal rhymes into detailed first-person scenes of Queensbridge: streets, friends, cops, crews. Critics compared it to a documentary or a Gordon Parks photo. Jay-Z, Ghostface Killah, Talib Kweli, Lupe Fiasco and Kendrick Lamar are among the rappers whose work has been linked to it.
• The producers. Before Illmatic, most rap albums had one or two producers. This one had five of the best in New York, each at their peak, and it still sounds like one record.
• The timing. With Wu-Tang’s 36 Chambers and Biggie’s Ready to Die, it put New York back at the center of hip hop when West Coast G-funk ruled the charts.
• No filler. Ten songs, about 40 minutes. The Source gave it five mics, which was unheard of for a debut, and the sales took time: No. 12 on the Billboard 200 in its first week, gold in 1996, platinum in 2001.

For the wider story of the city and its sound, read our history of hip hop in New York.

Did Nas write Illmatic?

Yes. Nas is credited as the writer of every song, and he started writing the lyrics when he was about 16. The producers are credited as co-writers for the music, along with the writers of the songs they sampled (for example, Jimmy Heath on “One Love” and the Gap Band’s Robert Wilson and Oliver Scott on “Life’s a Bitch”). AZ wrote his own verse on “Life’s a Bitch”.

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Nas – It Ain’t Hard to Tell (Official Video)

Highlights

• “N.Y. State of Mind”: Joe Chambers’ piano, a one-take verse and the most famous opening line on the album.
• “Life’s a Bitch”: AZ’s debut, Nas’ best hook about growing up, and Olu Dara’s cornet fading it out.
• “The World Is Yours”: Pete Rock’s Ahmad Jamal loop and the most hopeful song on a dark record.
• “One Love”: a letter to a friend in prison, over Q-Tip’s upright bass. Storytelling at its best.
• “It Ain’t Hard to Tell”: Michael Jackson flipped into a Queensbridge victory lap.

Illmatic on vinyl and CD

Illmatic is one of the easiest classics to own on vinyl: there is an official Columbia/Legacy reissue, and it is the first pick in our list of the best hip hop vinyl records to own. If you are setting up a turntable to listen or to sample, start with our guide to the best turntables for sampling and scratching.

What to hear next

Go back to where Nas started: Main Source’s Breaking Atoms (1991), produced by Large Professor, with Nas’ first verse on “Live at the Barbeque”. It is the missing first chapter of Illmatic, and a masterclass in early-’90s sampling.

Illmatic tracklist

Listen to Illmatic

Spotify

Apple Music

How this was made: written by GUIO, a hip hop producer who works on an MPC Live III, from the album itself, its credits and the interviews and sources listed below. Every sample in the tables was checked on WhoSampled.

Verdict

Illmatic is short, focused and generous at the same time. Five producers gave a 20-year-old their best work, and he gave them back ten songs that sound like a whole life in Queensbridge. For producers it is still a lesson in restraint: one loop, the right drums, room for the voice.

If you are new to it, start with “N.Y. State of Mind”, “The World Is Yours” and “It Ain’t Hard to Tell”, then play it front to back. It takes less than 40 minutes, and it has been worth it every year since 1994.