Between paying his dues at Hip-Hop Shop, building a buzz from his Out of Focus EP, and enjoying more visible success after joining the renowned group Slum Village, Elzhi always had a one-of-a-kind penchant for lyrical wizardry. With multilayered rhyme schemes, uncanny metaphors, and inventive concepts, he persistently had a case as the most gifted rapper in his city — even when Eminem dominated the charts.
But even some of his most dedicated fans knew that he hadn’t crafted a legacy-defining album yet. Such records often come from pain, and in 2009, that’s exactly what he dealt with: his Slum Village groupmate Baatin suddenly died in July, longtime manager and Detroit rap impresario HexMurda suffered a nearly fatal stroke two months later, and he went through a messy public breakup with SV the following year.

In 2011, Elzhi fearlessly took on the biggest challenge of his career: remaking Nas’ GOATed debut album Illmatic in his own name. He enlisted four-piece band Will Sessions to put a live, vibrant spin to sounds originally crafted by producers like DJ Premier, Pete Rock, and Large Professor, and demonstrated lyrical wisdom about when to maintain the original spirit of a song and when to switch things up. He conjures images of the blocks he grew up on with “Detroit State of Mind,” recounts a romance with a woman who had a traumatic childhood on “One Love,” and uses “Memory Lane” to take a nostalgic cruise through childhood connections before the pain from such reflections is too much to bear. The technical proficiency was potent as always, but emotiveness made Elmatic blossom: the wistfulness of his mother’s flowing hair before chemotherapy took it from her, falling in love with a woman he met in the mall, the palpable pride in the peaks and valleys of his city. It was a detailed, refined version of the introspection displayed on Out of Focus. Elmatic proved that Elzhi didn’t just have prodigious talent— he had a city to represent, and he had a story to tell. — William E. Ketchum III