Today in Hip-Hop — July 2: Nas Drops It Was Written 30 Years Ago Today, The Firm Assembles for the First Time

Thirty years ago today — July 2, 1996 — Nas walked into Columbia Records with an album that had one job: prove Illmatic wasn’t a fluke. It Was Written did that and then some. It debuted at #1 on the Billboard 200 with 269,000 first-week sold, went double platinum inside a year, and quietly drafted the blueprint every East Coast MC would spend the next decade trying to reverse-engineer. It also introduced the world to Nas Escobar — and to a supergroup called The Firm.

The Illmatic follow-up that shouldn’t have worked

The Illmatic-to-It Was Written pivot is one of hip-hop’s cleanest tightrope acts. Illmatic (April 1994) was a critical monolith that undersold — a five-mic universal classic that hip-hop heads worshipped and Columbia’s marketing team panicked over. Two years later, Nas came back with Steve Stoute in his ear and Trackmasters (Poke & Tone) handling the boards. He didn’t abandon the Queensbridge poetics — he wrapped them in mafioso silk and radio-ready samples. “The Message” flipped Sting’s “Shape of My Heart” into a slow-burn threat. “Street Dreams” turned Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams” into a crossover monster. And “If I Ruled the World (Imagine That)” — the album’s lead single with a young Lauryn Hill on the hook — married Kurtis Blow’s 1985 title cut to a Whodini interpolation and gave Nas his first pop-radio moment without diluting a single bar.

The real receipts are in the deep cuts. “I Gave You Power” is a four-minute short story rapped from the perspective of a gun — one of the most literary tracks in the QB canon, and a Preemo production that any Premier–Nas head can trace straight back to Illmatic. “Affirmative Action” assembled The Firm on wax for the very first time: Nas, AZ, Foxy Brown, and Cormega, four MCs stacking bars over a piano-driven Trackmasters beat. That song made a supergroup out of a studio session — The Firm’s self-titled album would land the following October (with Nature filling in for Cormega after the fallout). The rest of the production credits read like a boom-bap dream team: DJ Premier on “I Gave You Power,” Havoc from Mobb Deep on “The Set Up,” Dr. Dre pulling up from Aftermath for “Nas Is Coming,” and L.E.S. carrying his Illmatic connection into “Take It in Blood.” Critics who wanted a second Illmatic called it a compromise. Everyone else called it a coronation.

Wear the album that made It Was Written possible

We made a Nas Illmatic Hoodie that puts the album cover that started it all right across your chest. Wear it and every head over 35 nods at you on the train.

Also today in hip-hop

• Vince Staples turns 33 — born July 2, 1993 in Compton, later planted in Long Beach’s Ramona Park. His debut Summertime ’06 (2015) remains one of the coldest opening statements of the streaming era, and the run from Big Fish Theory (2017) through Dark Times (2024) makes him one of the last of a certain kind of West Coast literalist.
• The Firm’s public debut — “Affirmative Action” wasn’t just an It Was Written highlight. It set the template for late-’90s East Coast supergroups: Roc-A-Fella’s Dynasty crew, State Property, all of it downstream of that one Trackmasters beat and four Queens/Brooklyn MCs deciding to build a franchise.
• “If I Ruled the World” reshapes the crossover conversation — the Lauryn Hill hook, Whodini interpolation, and Kurtis Blow flip made it the first mafioso-rap-adjacent single to get MTV rotation without embarrassing itself. Lauryn would eclipse it two years later with Miseducation — but this was the warm-up.

Stay creative — The Custom Creative Team