The neighbors are the rotting East River and the "Big Alice" power plant, its smokestacks hacking up black clouds. I have loud static in the left channel and the quality degrades further as it reaches the center of the LP - ruining Halftime.

Over the last few months he has disarmed packed rooms of rowdy concert goers, leaving them silent as they hold fast to every syllable sung. If you listen to it enough names start to pop out: Fatcat, Alpo, Grand Wizard, Mayo, the foul cop who shot Garcia, Jerome's niece, Little Rob, Herb, Ice, and Bullet. All in all, I would have liked it to be a bit more introverted here and there and not so massively bombast, especially since the 94 just exudes this aura (for me) and this seems a bit pompous here, a huge show. That's why 19 years later, Get On Down is re-issuing a box set with a vinyl, gold CD, and an ersatz cherry wood case featuring a 48-page book with The Source article that originally crowned him-- even if Illmatic was the archetypal cassette album (along with the purple tape).

Now with a massively successful US tour opening for sweet soul darlings Thee Sacred Souls behind him, 2023 is sure to be a propitious year for Daptone's newest signee. It was after Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer, and leather-suited rappers wanted that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Secret of the Ooze money. This Kennedy performance does not dissapoint with Green Lantern on the cuts, Nas on the mic, and the orchestra in the back providing a proper backdrop to one of hip-hop's most rawest, dustiest, offerings. A routinely great artist, much of Sufjan's universal appeal comes from his skills as a gifted narrator, pairing personal musings on love and devotion with commentary on American culture, whilst welding folk and electronica, the ambient and existential. Over the last 19 years, a million secret handshakes and scratched hooks have been executed to lines from Illmatic: I woke up early on my born day; I sip the Dom P, watching Gandhi 'til I'm charged; you couldn't catch me in the streets without a ton of reefer, that's like Malcolm X catching jungle fever; I'm an addict for sneakers, twenties of Buddha, and bitches with beepers; vocabulary spills, I'm ill; life's a bitch and then you die.

Quite good to me: the vinyl is pretty quiet, the jacket is standard but well done, and the inner is rad as well.

It has no "Regulate" that can inspire drunken Nate Dogg sing-a-longs, but it is widely regarded as the greatest East Coast rap album ever made.