Time Is Illmatic brings a legendary hip-hop album to a whole new audience

"Is Nas the one in the blue suit?" asks a reporter to my right as we watch each arrival on the red carpet during the opening night of the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival. "Who's Pete Rock?" he asks. Then, a third question: "You said the one in maroon is Raekwon? What does he do?"

I'd like to launch into the story: How Nas — the star of tonight's event — was one of the defining artists of the East Coast hip-hop movement, and how his ridiculously influential 1994 debut album Illmatic is routinely cited as one of the greatest and most groundbreaking hip-hop albums ever recorded. Unfortunately, there's no time. We're here to see Time Is Illmatic, a documentary exploring the legacy of Illmatic, and Nas himself is here to answer questions.

"Does Nas do any movies?" the reporter asks me, frantic to come up with a question before it's too late. I say he's done a few, and the reporter turns to ask Nas: "When you're shooting movies, what do you do in your trailer?" "I don't do that many movies," the rapper says. "I just try to remember my lines and relax."

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Frustrating as such encounters may be, they're also kind of the point of Time Is Illmatic, which tells a valuable story about hip-hop history to an audience that might not be familiar with it. "We don't want to underestimate audiences' propensity to understand and have empathy," says co-writer and co-producer Erik Parker. "So, while Illmatic was made for 'us' — this generation of people who related to Nas' story and understood it — and it spoke for us, we're very happy that, 20 years later, there are people who are willing to attempt to find out where this came from and what was happening at that time."

"There wasn't a commercial single on [Illmatic]," adds director One9. "It was really underground, raw. llmatic was meant for the people inside [Nas'] neighborhood and outside his window, and was connected to a hip-hop generation that really resonated sonically and lyrically with what the music was. We love the fact that now, 20 years later, you have institutions honoring 20 years of Illmatic as a prestigious legacy. That Tribeca is doing this opening film, 20 years later in New York City, recognizing the greatness of something that transcended boundaries, transcended genres, and transcended race. We're not commercializing [Nas'] world; we're bringing you in — into a world that was overlooked. Nas becomes a voice for its voiceless people."

The legacy to which One9 refers is cemented in part thanks to Harvard's establishment of the Nasir Jones Hip-Hop Fellowship, which funds "scholars that build on the rich and complex hip-hop tradition." But where Nas' Harvard visit in Time Is Illmatic reveals a man aware of his debut album's sweeping resonance, the documentary also renders a portrait of the younger Nas: a floundering, frustrated product of street life's skewed moral codes.

"When Nas first came out, he was a young kid. He was a naturally guarded person," says Parker. "But he knew the world of Queensbridge, the biggest housing projects in the country, and he became somewhat of a curious figure to the [outside] world. So, just like he did in the projects, he had to have some sort of guard. He was a guarded person for most of his career. These last several years, he's grown into his legacy and started to reflect. He's growing into realizing the next phase of his artistry, and understanding what all that creation was made for, and now he's articulating that. He's at a place where he's dropped his guard and he's opening up to the world."

Time Is Illmatic examines individual tracks from the album. Whether about gang violence and its associated horrors, the dehumanization of the prison system, or the alternately empowering and corrupting sense of greed wrought by the emergence of crack cocaine, Illmatic's complex verse structures (informed by the literary works Nas' father, jazz musician Olu Dara, exposed him to in childhood) are broken down by the first-time director bar for bar to amplify distinct systemic ills for the world to see. "People would be misled if they thought that this was just a deconstruction of the making of the album, and just a deconstruction of the music," says Parker. "It's more of a deconstruction of a time, through the music. Once we looked at it through that lens, we understood what needed to be told from the music, and how we could enter into the greater story."

The extent to which Nas' eyes roll in the face of fluff questions on the red carpet, then, perhaps tells the story of how a now-prominent figure in music holds fast to a vision that supersedes the superficialities of stardom. "When you listen to him rhyme, it's like watching a movie," says Pete Rock, who produced "The World Is Yours," Illmatic's Scarface-influenced survivalist anthem. "The album came out in '94, and music did change as time went along, and a lot of things did get missing. But this album exists on a mountaintop. It just tells people, 'Pay attention to this format. This is how hip-hop sounds.'"