California Roots Music and Arts Festival lets its hip-hop flag fly high.

Over the last few years, the world’s largest reggae-rock festival has added hip-hop flavor, including The Roots, Cypress Hill and Dilated Peoples, to the stoney delight of its 30,000-plus fans.

The California Roots Music and Arts Festival has upped the hip-hop ante in its eighth year with Saturday’s headliner. But Nas (9:30pm Saturday, Main Stage) isn’t just another hip-hop act, added to a mostly reggae-rock salad in the spirit of versatility: He’s a legendary musician, genres aside, cemented from the start by his 1994 debut Illmatic. Rife with an intimate urgency a la Gil Scott-Heron, Nas turns his mind’s eye loose like a cinema verite documentary film, and the resulting prose burrows deep inside your soul.

Even if you’ve never been within a hundred miles of Nas’ native Queensbridge, Illmatic makes you smell, taste, see, feel and hear everything as if you were there right beside him as he craved another, less brutal reality.

“My window faces shootouts, drug overdoses, live amongst no roses, only the drama/ For real, a nickel-plate is my fate.” (That’s from “Memory Lane (Sittin’ in Da Park).”)

He adds this in “The World is Yours,” one of the myriad refrains that followers collate on seemingly endless lists of his best lyrics: “Born alone, die alone; no crew to keep my crown or throne.”

Another favorite comes on “N.Y. State of Mind”: “I never sleep, ’cause sleep is the cousin of death/ Beyond the walls of intelligence, life is defined.”

The hooks, beats, rhythms and samples accompanying Nas’ cauldron of literary devices add up to something so spellbinding, they inspire a flood of academic work written specifically about the album. Writer Matthew Gasteier published a deconstruction of Illmatic for the notoriously elite and detailed 33 1/3 book series. In 2012, Shaun Neblett actually wrote a play, Homage 3: Illmatic, centered around the album’s themes. How often does that happen?

Around the same time Illmatic dropped, hip-hop outfit Jurassic 5 (6:10pm Sunday, Main Stage) was born in Los Angeles, guided by a collective of known talents including acclaimed DJ Cut Chemist, rapper Chali 2na and DJ Nu-Mark.

In addition to the aforementioned hip-hop offerings, popular Washington, D.C. electronica duo Thievery Corporation (8:10pm Sunday, Cali Roots Stage) will make their Cali Roots debut.

They will be joined by Cali Roots favorites who represent some of reggae-rock’s most beloved performers: Rebelution (9:30pm Friday, Main Stage), SOJA (8:10pm Friday, Cali Roots Stage), Dirty Heads (9:30pm Sunday, Main Stage) and Matisyahu (Friday, 4:05pm, Cali Roots Stage).

Iration’s (6:10pm Saturday, Main Stage) Micah Pueschel (lead vocals, guitar) estimates the group has performed at the gathering every other year since its inception. This year, they have new music in hand. Last Friday, Iration released the first single off its upcoming, yet-to-be-titled record.

“Fly With Me” comes with a preface: “This is a song inspired by the cosmos and the vastness of space and imagination. Get lost in this one.”

While “Fly With Me” is indicative of Iration’s brand of blue-eyed, Santa Barbara reggae, there are some new rhythmic patterns garnished with a spacey, trip-hop sensibility. And the lyrics match the vibe, opening with a one-word sentence: “Relax.”

“I know you’ve never been this high before/ the stars, the moons and the constellations/ Let’s leave this world and take a trip/ Don’t let anybody say you’re wrong for taking a lift.”

Pueschel says the record, due out in late 2017 or early 2018, reflects Iration’s evolution, thanks to the addition of guitarist Micah Brown and trumpet player Drake Peterson – its updated lineup reveals a “bigger range of sounds” than the band’s previous work. Pueschel describes some of the tunes as “pop or indie rock [with] a lot of different styles and in between.”

Pueschel says that many of the songs were written in the middle of the 2016 election cycle, which sometimes made the surrounding rhetoric impossible to avoid.

“Previous records we made a point not to be political,” Pueschel says. “We were more of a band that you can take your mind off [politics]. But we’re going to write songs that are true to us and what we’re feeling. If you don’t write music that comes from a genuine place, it’s always noticeable to listeners.”

Pueschel refers to the day Trump won the election and reflects on the experience of comforting his wife, an elementary school teacher, as she broke into tears after the school day.

“Many kids in her class, which is made up largely of minorities, came to school scared,” he says. “It affected her and, in turn, that affected me.”

Pueschel believes that pain helped yield some of Iration’s best songwriting.

“We try to write songs that are accessible, so that anyone from any culture can hear it and be able to digest it,” Pueschel says. “We now have a clear-cut vision of the kind of songs we want to write.”

CALIFORNIA ROOTS FESTIVAL begins 11am Friday, Saturday and Sunday, May 26-28. Monterey County Fairgrounds, 2004 Fairgrounds Road, Monterey. $210 (plus $33.12 fees)/three-day pass; $90 (plus $14.76 fees)/single-day pass; VIP sold out. californiarootsfestival.com