Notorious B.I.G.

September 13, 1994 — or rather, 2024

It's hard to listen to “Ready To Die” without thinking of it as one of the greatest and most celebrated hip-hop albums of all time, weaving its lyrics together with the glorious and tragic story of Notorious B.I.G. and looking back at the music of thirty years ago, at the infamous feud between east and west. Hard, but not impossible — and thrilling. If you strip “Ready To Die” of its history, set aside for once the urge to frame it as the legendary album it is, and put to one side its peculiar place in the all-too-brief discography of Biggie Smalls (the only album he released in his lifetime…), “Ready To Die” reveals itself to our ears as an overwhelming experience, tragic yet at times even funny, rich in nuance.

We can also set aside, for once, the list of commercial hits and the enthusiasm — understandable but by now well-worn — of international critics, which we've already covered in our dedicated feature, and listen with fresh ears, almost as if it had come out on Friday, September 13, 2024, rather than on a Tuesday thirty years earlier. Like every truly great classic, “Ready To Die” works regardless of its context, its historical framing and its influence. It has a force that reaches even those with no background in hip-hop, who couldn't tell Tupac from Jay-Z, and who might normally listen to something else entirely. So let's try listening to it again today, together.

The Life and Death of Biggie Smalls

“Ready To Die” is an album of nearly seventy minutes, comprising 15 songs, an intro and an interlude. Notorious B.I.G. is on the mic throughout, with the sole exception of “Method Man”'s appearance from the Wu-Tang Clan on one track. Notorious B.I.G. aka Biggie Smalls is the undisputed star, and to make up for the solitude of carrying the mic alone, he pulls out every trick in the book: he switches up his flow and even his accent, at times performing multiple versions of himself, almost like different characters each with their own delivery. Notorious B.I.G. is a showman, with all the confidence of a true great: he's 22, but the mic bends to his every whim, the rhymes come out powerful, the rhythm is innate. He tells his own story, his past, his present and his dreams for the future, alternating nostalgia, tenderness, violence and bitterness.

Even though the album is called “Ready To Die”, Biggie pours his whole life into it, alternating between diary entries and anthems, between faded snapshots of a hard childhood and glimpses of a success he once only imagined and can finally enjoy. But there's also a darker side to it, a premonition of death and perhaps even a longing for it: too much life, maybe, for someone barely into his twenties.

“Ready To Die” is a striking title, all the more so combined with the cover art: “ready to die” might suggest a muscular, aggressive approach, that of an uncompromising tough guy, but the photo shows a child with an afro against a white background, a symbol of innocence, of possibilities yet to be discovered, and of life itself. It isn't actually Biggie, but a certain Keithroy Yearwood: a mere detail, since the message is that this child is Notorious B.I.G., representing and embodying him; by the time the album begins, we already have that innocent, carefree gaze of the child firmly fixed in our minds.

It's him crying, and therefore, at the same time, Notorious B.I.G., as he comes into the world in the long intro, which moves from the moment of birth through a musical upbringing defined by Curtis Mayfield's “Superfly”, the Sugarhill Gang's “Rapper's Delight”, Audio Two's “Top Billin'”, Snoop Dogg's “Tha Shiznit”, but also amid domestic quarrels, crime and time behind bars. Having summed up his life up to this debut album in three and a half minutes, aided by a cinematic sense of the various “scenes” brought to life by different voices and characters, the rest of the album is a succession of tracks portraying Notorious B.I.G. in his present as hip-hop's rising star, the product of a troubled past but also the ambitious protagonist of a future still waiting to be discovered.

The big plan starts to unfold on “Things Done Change”, opened by an intertwining of four samples (the drums from “California My Way” by The Main Ingredient; the bass from “Summer Breeze”, also by The Main Ingredient; the phrase “Back in the day” lifted from Biz Markie’s “The Vapors”; and “Things done changed on this side/Remember they used to thump but now they blast, right” taken from Dr. Dre’s “Lil’ Ghetto Boy”), which producer Darnell Scott uses to build a beat over which the rapper can reconstruct how life in the neighborhood has changed since the 1980s, moving from block-party barbecues to everyday violence, from kids playing in the street to murders, from kung-fu to guns; he himself has moved from dealing to rapping. The track also introduces the rapper's mic style, delivering every single word with tireless energy without ever letting that intensity undermine the music's flow. His round tone, powerful voice and ability to venture into lower registers add variety to the verses, while the hooks are often handled by the samples. Biggie's skill with meter proves exceptional right from the start, even when the lines shift and grow irregular. One example comes in the third verse, where in just four lines he shows himself to be a true virtuoso:

If I wasn’t in the rap game

I’d probably have a ki, knee-deep in the crack game

Because the streets is a short stop

Either you’re slingin’ crack rock or you got a wicked jump shot

The length of each line varies dramatically: yet in how the rapper lays them out, the first and third lines end up feeling connected (playing on duration and on the identical rhyme “game”), while the second and fourth are longer. This forces a constant adjustment of pace across the four lines, lending them tremendous dynamism. While the rhyme scheme of the first two lines is simple, built on that identical rhyme in “game”, what follows reveals a far more elaborate web of rhymes and assonances: “crack” recurs in lines two and four; “short” links back to “shot” but also to “stop”, and echoes again in “crack” and “rock”. In just four lines, Notorious B.I.G. proves himself anything but a naive lyricist, a talent he shows off again and again throughout the album.

“Gimme The Loot” also shows off another remarkable feat: the rapper uses two different “voices” on the track, one with a pronounced Jamaican accent and a higher pitch. While the samples nod to A Tribe Called Quest, James Brown and Ice Cube within the hypnotic funk built by producer Easy Mo Bee, the rapper proves remarkably skilled at narrating street life. “Machine Gun Funk”, again produced by Easy Mo Bee in a funk mode this time built on three samples (“Something Extra” by Black Heat; “Up For The Down Stroke” by The Horny Horns, later removed for legal reasons; “Chief Rocka” by Lords Of The Underground), draws a parallel between his criminal past and his life as a rapper, stressing that there's no contradiction in this evolution.

After a cinematic intro and three tracks, you're already so immersed in the story, carried forward rhyme after rhyme, won over by this larger-than-life rapper and by Easy Mo Bee's groove-laden productions, that when the title track arrives it hits like a gut punch: if the fifth track, “Warning” (sampling Isaac Hayes, the Meters and Funkadelic) continues to narrate a life caught between criminal memories and a present of redemption, keeping an amused pulp streak that culminates in the final shootout, “Ready To Die” is a punch to the stomach. The old life can end, to make way for rebirth. The imagery in the lyrics is often tied to death and to the annihilation of everything (“Fuck the world, fuck my moms and my girl”), complete with a nod to “Scarface” (“So die, motherfuckers, die, motherfuckers, die”) via a Kool G. Rap sample. He's a furious rapper, ready for battle (“You better grab your guns ‘cause I’m ready”), who feels himself at the top of the rap game, on both coasts (note the reference to Compton):

Your face, my feet, they meet with stompin’

I’m rippin’ MC’s from Tallahassee to Compton

Biggie Smalls on a higher plane

Niggas say I’m strange, deranged because I put the 12 gauge to your brain

Make your shit splatter

Mix the blood like batter then my pocket gets fatter

After the hit, leave you on the street with your neck slit

Down your backbone to where your motherfuckin’ shit drip

Notorious B.I.G.'s new life is thus only a partial emancipation from the violent world he came from, because that same aggression now becomes the weapon he uses to conquer the rap scene. The anger and trauma of the past are still alive, as is the sense of precariousness and danger he lived through growing up. Biggie is “ready to die”, meaning ready to do whatever it takes to change his life for good. The track's intensity isn't just a matter of language (19 instances of “fuck” and its derivatives; 6 of “shit”) or of tension-building production (the constant looping of Barbara Mason's “Yes, I’m Ready” intertwined with “Scarface”), but also a matter of interpretation and imaginative power: “dying” here stands for “ending for good”, with the grim verb signalling an absolute, unshakeable intent, stronger than anything else, to leave behind a past of drugs and crime; the lines are, at times, less spoken than spat out, with every last breath, as if to purge the pain.

The lighter, spicier “One More Chance”, produced by Bluez Brothers, Chucky Thompson and Sean “Puffy” Combs, still injects tension through a catchy keyboard riff, and sets up the porny skit of the interlude “Fuck Me”, before the aforementioned Method Man steps in on “The What”: it's a way of measuring himself against one of the scene's heavyweights, so much so that Biggie rewrote his verse so as not to be outshone by the Wu-Tang standout.

Yet the real magic lies in how Notorious B.I.G. returns to telling his own story of change and rebirth, and it's this that makes the album exceptional. That's confirmed in succession by “Juicy”, also chosen as the first single, and “Everyday Struggle”. In the first, the rapper's own story runs parallel to the story of hip-hop itself. It opens with a bitter dedication to everyone who never believed in him, even as a kid, and to all the niggas scraping by on hustles:

Yeah, this album is dedicated

To all the teachers that told me I’d never amount to nothin’

To all the people that lived above the buildings that I was hustlin’ in front of

Called the police on me when I was just tryin’ to make some money to feed my daughter (it’s all good)

And all the niggas in the struggle

You know what I’m sayin’? It’s all good, baby baby

It could well be the album's opener, and it sums up its strengths: Biggie's dynamic flow, content rich in both personal and collective references, and a delivery that shifts easily between more laid-back passages and more aggressive ones. “Juicy” is a nostalgia-soaked portrait of a past that was hard yet sweet, animated by faded childhood photos, songs as trivial as they are unforgettable, and memories that are both painful and precious. The eighties-tinged shimmer of the chorus carries you somewhere between dream and reality.

Metrically and lyrically, it's a tour de force, a text worth studying for any rap fan: the rich rhyme scheme, the well-placed pauses, the way syllables are distributed over the beat, and the shifts in pace all add to the track's depth, revealing new details even after countless listens.

We used to fuss when the landlord dissed us

No heat, wonder why Christmas missed us

Birthdays was the worst days

Now we sip Champagne when we thirsty

Uh, damn right I like the life I live

‘Cause I went from negative to positive and it’s all (It’s all good, nigga)

And if you don’t know, now you know, nigga

“Everyday Struggle” again tells the story of street life, this time with a fast flow and verses dense with syllables, and consistently the dark, deathly imagery returns. Things lighten up with “Me And My Bitch”, with a brazen line like “You look so good, huh, I’ll suck on your daddy’s dick”, before Sean “Puffy” Combs and Chucky Thompson cook up a sensual funk for “Big Poppa”, the second single released from the album and akin to the west-coast and g-funk sound. The delivery changes completely, becoming more sensual and restrained, while a sample of “Between The Sheets” by the Isley Brothers glides smoothly underneath.

To tell his own story, on “Respect” he also brings in Jamaican singer Diana King, reconnecting with his family's origins: he starts from his birth in the first verse, then moves on to adolescence (“Scarface, King of New York, I want to be it /Rap was secondary, money was necessary”) and finally to the present.

His troubled relationship with women, which spills into misogyny on the lively “Friend Of Mine”, risks being forgotten as soon as Dj Premier's production for “Unbelievable” kicks in, a textbook boom-bap track that shows how comfortable Notorious B.I.G. is even over more stripped-down beats, and especially in light of the closing “Suicidal Thoughts”, produced by Lord Finesse as a nocturnal track, like the phone call the rapper makes to his friend Sean “Puffy” Combs before killing himself. The opening lines are among the most striking of the era:

When I die, fuck it, I wanna go to hell

‘Cause I’m a piece of shit, it ain’t hard to fuckin’ tell

At the end of the song, and of the album, a gunshot rings out: Notorious B.I.G. was ready to die, and he killed himself. The story of his life, from birth to his last breath, is an epic that recalls Scorsese's crime films, with a twist of melancholy and tenderness. In the silence that follows the shot, we look back at the cover, meeting the gaze of the child sitting in the photo: now his eyes seem to hold more depth, telling a story that isn't easy to sum up in a few adjectives, perhaps not even in a few lines. It takes a great album, full of stories, references and emotions, like “Ready To Die”.

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14/09/2024