village voice > music >"Likewise New York hiphop stopped being interesting when it stopped being about crack—not just dealing, but the world crack made spatially and racially in the '80s. There are no great Black American novels about the crack epoch yet, only grand hiphop operas—Big's Ready to Die, Raekwon's Cuban Linx, Jay's Streets Is Watching, and the grandest of them all, Nas's Illmatic. That album made explicit for all time the difference between the MC who thinks in dithyrambic parables and the one who thinks in lucid paragraphs and lurid photographs. Illmatic owns the crack moment as surely as Hendrix owns Vietnam. Nas is truly hiphop's Scorsese, a gifted storyteller who didn't so much seek out crime and mortality as those subjects found him, cornered him..."