Artwork
In an early promotional interview, Nas claimed that the name "Illmatic" (meaning "beyond ill" or "the ultimate") was a reference to his incarcerated Queensbridge friend, Illmatic Ice. Nas later described the title name as "supreme ill. It's as ill as ill gets. That shit is a science of everything ill." The album cover features a picture of Nas as a child, which was taken after his father, musician Olu Dara, returned home from an overseas tour. The original cover was intended to have a picture of Nas holding Jesus Christ in a headlock, reflecting the religious imagery of Nas' rap on "Live at the Barbeque"; "When I was 12, I went to hell for snuffing Jesus". The accepted cover, designed by Aimee Macauley, features a photo of Nas as a child superimposed over a backdrop of a New York city block, taken by Danny Clinch. In a 1994 interview, Nas discussed the concept behind the photo of him at age 7, stating "That was the year I started to acknowledge everything . That's the year everything set off. That's the year I started seeing the future for myself and doing what was right. The ghetto makes you think. The world is ours. I used to think I couldn't leave my projects. I used to think if I left, if anything happened to me, I thought it would be no justice or I would be just a dead slave or something. The projects used to be my world until I educated myself to see there's more out there."
XXL magazine called the album cover a "high art photo concept for a rap album" and described the artwork as a "noisy, confusing streetscape looking through the housing projects and a young boy superimposed in the center of it all." The XXL columnist also compared the cover to that of rapper Lil Wayne's sixth studio album Tha Carter III (2008), stating that it also "reflects the reality of disenfranchised youth today." Music columnist Byron Crawford later called the cover for Illmatic "one of the dopest album covers ever in hip-hop." On the song "Shark Niggas (Biters)" from his debut album Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... (1995), rapper Raekwon with Ghostface Killah criticized the cover of The Notorious B.I.G's Ready to Die (1994), which was released a few months after Illmatic, for featuring a picture of a baby with an afro, implying that his cover had copied the idea from Nas. In a 2009 interview with XXL, Nas discussed the purpose behind the album artwork among other promotional efforts, stating "Really the record had to represent everything Nasir Jones is about from beginning to end, from my album cover to my videos. My record company had to beg me to stop filmin' music videos in the projects. No matter what the song was about I had 'em out there. That’s what it was all about for me, being that kid from the projects, being a poster child for that, that didn’t exist back then."
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