February 25th, 2009 by niwa | posted in download, hiphop, info, review |

In the mid-90’s I never missed an issue of The Source, which is still one of the biggest hip hop magazines around. Back then the music still was a bastard child in the general music magazines/charts/etc and since virtually no-one had a decent internet connection there were only a couple of ways to keep up with the new releases and artists coming out. The three major ways were:

• Going to parties and pestering the DJ every 5 mins by asking ‘hey man, what are you playing now?’.
• Your friends. Who heard about stuff from their friends. Who, in turn, heard about it from their friends. And so on.
• Reading foreign magazines.

Over the years hip hop became a more mainstream style, the internet went from dial-up to cable connections, and music tv channels started to get bigger and bigger. This was one cause of the drop of interest in magazines. On the other side, magazines got more and more biased (I won’t even go into the whole Benzino/Source thing) and the amount of pages per magazine went down while the amount of advertisements in those magazines slightly grew. Where I used to lay down 5 Guilders for The Source, I now have to lay down 7 Euro’s to cop it. That means I’m paying more than double for a magazine that has half the content it used to have.

So why should we buy a magazine? Because sometimes they feature an article that you just can’t miss out on. XXL Magazine just laid one down for their April 2009 (wait.. isn’t it February now?) issue, and whether you’re a fan in your teens now or in your 30’s, you probably know the album on which the article is centered: The alltime classic from Nas, ‘Illmatic‘.

Some guy named Thomas V. was nice enough to drop hi-res scans of the article online, which features a track-by-track nostalgia comment-race by big names like DJ Premier, Large Professor, L.E.S., MC Serch, AZ, Q-Tip and ofcourse Nas himself. Next to a really dope article you also get some back-in-the-day photographs of Nas and his companions.

Get it here (found by Skidz and traced back to ‘the T.R.O.Y. blog‘)