More than twenty-two years after the release of Nas’s landmark debut studio album Illmatic, a controversial new study conducted by researchers at New York University has refuted one of the record’s major claims, concluding after months of painstaking tests and several near-death experiences that after all, we do need the occasional sleep.
The study brought together leading academics from NYU’s schools of medicine and psychology, collaborators from sometimes quarrelsome institutions along the West Coast and Dirty South, and specialists in sleep therapy and pop-culture from across the breadth of the contiguous United States. Despite Nas appearing in 2010 on the reboot of the eponymous police procedural, the study team failed to reach any agreement with academics from Hawaii, while prospective participation from Alaskans proved a question left unasked.
Summing up the study’s results, project head Dr. Benjamin Spiezler quipped that ‘if sleep is indeed the cousin of death, according to our findings no sleep must be its twin sibling’. Nas of course, on the standout Illmatic track ‘N.Y State of Mind’, famously alleged ‘I never sleep, ’cause sleep is the cousin of death’, an assertion too bold to be dismissed as mere braggadocio.
Stepping beyond the walls that usually proscribe the world of academia, subjects for the study were rounded up from all the boroughs of New York, but especially from Nas’s birthplace in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and from the Queensbridge Houses development in Long Island City where he grew up. Polysomnography and other sleep-related tests were administered, in rooms overseen by the experts but with the patients unattended and the doors left unlocked.
Though several of the test subjects awoke – after falling asleep naturally or being put to sleep by doses of drugs, from your everyday zolpidem to temazepam, which is made of much sterner stuff – to find themselves without wallets, and a couple were even non-critically stabbed, in general the control group fared better than those who were forced to endure no sleep, with wide-ranging deleterious consequences.
The no-sleep test group suffered all sorts of ailments, from tiredness to hallucinations, depressive episodes, paranoias, and even suicidal thoughts. Some after just twenty-four hours without sleep were unable to solve simple math problems. Over longer periods, subjects became prone to weakened immune systems, weight gain, and high blood pressure. And when they eventually and inevitably did nod off, their sleep was disrupted, with loud snoring, sleepwalking, gnashing of teeth, and in extreme cases sleep apnoea so severe it brought them, barely breathing, perilously close to death.
One subject reportedly did die in this quest to disclose the veracity of the lyrics on Illmatic, but his passing was hushed up. The deceased is unfortunately unable to relay his experience of the study, but with one dead owing to lack of sleep, the results seem pretty conclusive. So as Nas embarks on finalising or promoting his upcoming album – which according to DJ Khaled is already done – please after so many years won’t the legendary purveyor of hip hop finally get some rest?
