Nas rhyming at Boulevard Pool

“I was trying to make you experience my life. I wanted you to look at hip-hop differently. I wanted you to feel that hip-hop was changing and becoming something more real. I gave you what the streets felt like, what it sounded like and tasted like. I tried to capture that like no one else could,” Nasir “Nas” Jones, “Time Is Illmatic.”

“Time is Illmatic” is a documentary film about a documentary album.

The record in question: “Illmatic,” the 1994 debut from rapper Nas, who made his life into a saga of the streets.

The album turned 20 this year, though in a way, it hasn’t aged much at all.

It still sounds as poetically harrowing now as it did back then.

“Illmatic” feels claustrophobic, set in an urban labyrinth where “each block is like a maze, full of black rats trapped,” as Nas raps on “N.Y. State of Mind,” where street corners double as black market fiefdoms, defended to the death.

“My window faces shootouts, drug overdoses / Live amongst no roses, only the drama, for real / A nickel-plate is my fate,” Nas chronicles on “Life’s a Bitch.”

It’s an unforgiving landscape, but from this crucible, Nasir Jones emerged to provide the narrative for a group of people — his people — whose story often went untold.

“Time Is Illmatic,” which is currently available on video on demand, chronicles the making of the record and Nas’ early life simultaneously because really, they’re one in the same.

The release of the film coincides with the 20th anniversary of the album, which Nas is now commemorating on tour where he’s performing “Illmatic” in its entirety.

The record is widely regarded as one of the greatest hip-hop albums of all time, and there’s plenty of on-camera testimonials to its significance in “Time Is Illmatic.”

“ ‘Illmatic’ is one of those transformative moments in hip-hop,” Pharrell Williams says. “He had the courage to tell the truth about the dark side of black existence in America,” Dr. Cornell West states. “It was so honest and so truthful that it’s never not going to be one of the best albums of all time,” Alicia Keys adds.

Context is important here.

“Illmatic” came out in the spring of ’94, six months after the Wu-Tang Clan debuted with “Enter the Wu-Tang” and five months before Biggie Smalls dropped his first album, “Born To Die.”

Together, these three records would spark a renaissance in East Coast hip-hop by favoring gritty realism, frequently employing murky jazz- and soul-influenced production values and an emphasis on a more involved lyricism. This at a time when the West Coast G-funk sound was commercially dominant thanks to Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg and 2Pac.

Of all these records, what makes “Illmatic” truly resonate — and by extension, the film made about it — is how earnestly reflective it is of the environment in which it was born.

“Time is Illmatic” underscores this time and again.

Toward the end of the film, there’s a particularly powerful scene where Nas and his brother Jabari are talking about one of the photos taken for the CD booklet.

The shot was snapped outside the housing project where they grew up, and features them surrounded by friends and associates — some of them bitter enemies — all of whom came together to celebrate the burgeoning success of one of their own.

The camera zooms in on a young boy in a stocking cap near the center of the picture.

“He’s doing 15 years,” Jabari notes.

“He’s doing life,” he says of another.

And so begins a grim rundown, where Jabari ticks off the incarceration history of person after person in the photo.

The film cuts to Nas who takes it all in and is momentarily speechless.

His face telegraphs what he’s thinking: It could as easily been him on Jabari’s list.

“It makes me really realize that if it wasn’t for music, you would have told a story about that kid, too, on the bench,” he says afterward, referencing himself.

“Illmatic,” then, was an escape from the very streets it was so indebted to.

Since those days, Nas has sold more than 20 million records and become one of hip-hop’s signature voices, conscientious, clever, occasionally combative.

“Time Is Illmatic” concludes with Nas taking a trip to Harvard to commemorate the Nasir Jones Hip-Hop Fellowship, established at the university as part of its Hip-Hop Archives to fund scholars and artists engaged in academic pursuits related to hip-hop.

During the car ride there, Nas recalls a line from “Book of Rhymes,” a track from his sixth album, “God’s Son”: “My people be in projects or jail / Never Harvard or Yale.”

“And here we are,” he says.

Nas dropped out of school in junior high.

But he didn’t stop learning.

Or teaching.

Contact reporter Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476. Follow on Twitter @JasonBracelin.