Movies & Lyrics is our new blog series that takes a glance at the influence of screenwriters on musicians and songwriters. With each new post, we’ll take known songs and examine how a particular turn of phrase or thematic element was inspired by a film (and specifically the film’s screenplay).
Rapper Nas’ lyrics feel like cinema.
In them, there’s more than poetry. His rhymes contain painstaking detail of places, of people, of specific street corners, of small transactions, of every human emotion, from blowhard confidence to the lowest depths of despair.
Nowhere is this more true than on his 1994 debut album Illmatic, a canonical work in hip-hop and widely regarded as one of the best albums of all time.
According to Nas himself, in his youth, he loved movies and wrote screenplays (in addition to rhymes, of course). Though he ultimately pursued rapping, there’s no question about the filmic influence on Nas’ artistic sensibility.
This week, we look at a Nas song inspired by this excerpt of Oliver Stone’s screenplay for Scarface (1983), an enduringly controversial and popular film remake about a Cuban refugee who arrives during the Mariel Boatlift in Miami and moves from poverty to power, becoming a malevolent (and ultimately doomed) drug lord:
“THE WORLD IS YOURS” is a significant phrase in Scarface. Here in the script, Stone takes care to give the words their own line—and he bolds and underlines them. Young, fictional Tony Montana drinks them in.
We see the words a second time when Tony marries Elvira, the wife of his former boss Frank Lopez. Tony has made “THE WORLD IS YOURS” the catchphrase of his… uh… business operation.
Finally, we see “THE WORLD IS YOURS” reflected in the pool after Tony’s downfall when he’s shot to death in his own pool. A real aristotelian ending for an anti-hero.
The appearance of the phrase adheres to the storytelling convention of rule of three. In the script we see “The World Is Yours” examined from multiple vantage points.
No one needs this blog post to plumb the influence of the gangster film genre on rap and hip-hop. There’s plenty of great literature and scholarship on this topic. For decades, MCs have espoused their reverence for everything from The Public Enemy (1931) to The Godfather Trilogy and especially to Scarface.
A cadre of rappers, in their lyrics (and in Houston rapper Scarface’s case, in name), have tended to equivocate themselves to Tony Montana’s sheer violent outlaw power. Nas himself on the track “NY State of Mind” asserts: “I'm like Scarface sniffin' cocaine / Holdin' an M16, see, with the pen I'm extreme / Now, bullet holes left in my peepholes / I'm suited up with street clothes, hand me a .9 and I'll defeat foes.”
It’s on another Illmatic track that Nas takes a sublter approach. “The World Is Yours” is a song less about emulating Scarface and more about finding inspiration in his mantra.
Just as the phrase “THE WORLD IS YOURS” resonates with Tony Montana, it also resonates with Nas.
The song “The World Is Yours” (co-written with Pete Rock) is a moment of weightlessness and optimism amidst otherwise brutal subjects as Nas holds a metaphorical and unrelenting camera up to his young life in the rough Queensbridge public housing development in Queens, New York. This track comes right after “Life’s a Bitch” where the refrain is “Life’s a bitch and then you die.”
Here, producer Pete Rock’s sampling and looping of Ahmad Jamal’s “I Love Music” feels like sonic equivalent of magic realism. Some of the lyrics:
(It's yours)
Whose world is this?
The world is yours, the world is yours
It's mine, it's mine, it's mine—whose world is this?
(It's yours)
It's mine, it's mine, it's mine—whose world is this?
The world is yours, the world is yours
It's mine, it's mine, it's mine—whose world is this?
I sip the Dom P, watchin' Gandhi 'til I'm charged, then
Writin' in my book of rhymes, all the words past the margin
To hold the mic I'm throbbin', mechanical movement
Understandable smooth shit that murderers move with
The thief's theme, play me at night, they won't act right
The fiend of hip-hop has got me stuck like a crack pipe
The mind activation, react like I'm facin'
Time like Pappy Mason, with pens I'm embracin'
Wipe the sweat off my dome, spit the phlegm on the streets
Suede Timbs on my feet makes my cipher complete
Whether cruisin' in a Sikh's cab or Montero Jeep
I can't call it, the beats make me fallin' asleep
I keep fallin', but never fallin' six feet deep
I'm out for presidents to represent me (Say what?)
I'm out for presidents to represent me (Say what?)
I'm out for dead presidents to represent me
Whose world is this?
The world is yours, the world is yours
It's mine, it's mine, it's mine—whose world is this?
The world is yours, the world is yours
It's mine, it's mine, it's mine—whose world is this?
(It's yours)
It's mine, it's mine, it's mine—whose world is this?
The world is yours, the world is yours
It's mine, it's mine, it's mine—whose world is this?
It sounds like the kind of hope you can only find in New York City. (Is it coincidental that Oliver Stone is from NYC too?)
That’s the thing about Illmatic. It’s never one emotion at once, which is a good lesson for writers of all kinds to take in. It’s grief and a little hope as you “spit phlegm on the streets” with “Suede Timbs on your feets.”
A chant, an incantation perhaps, to be held and examined by all and from many angles.
THE WORLD IS YOURS.
Until next time…