Nas: Time Is Illmatic

"Nas: Time Is Illmatic" (2014) is an American music documentary you can watch online on iFILM. Director One9 made the film to mark 20 years since "Illmatic" arrived — Nas's debut, recorded when he was 20 and living in Queensbridge Houses, Queens, and still placed on short lists of the most consequential rap records ever made.

At 74 minutes, the film covers the people who shaped it: Pete Rock, M.C. Serch, Q-Tip, Marley Marl, with Busta Rhymes, Pharrell Williams, and Alicia Keys on what the album meant beyond its sales. Cornel West and Henry Louis Gates Jr. come in to set it in broader cultural history — not a standard move for a hip-hop documentary, and the right one here. What the film gets right is showing Queensbridge in the early '90s without softening it: poverty, violence, and a housing project that somehow produced several of the sharpest lyricists of that generation. Stream "Nas: Time Is Illmatic" (2014) online on iFILM.