READY TO LIVE: The "Ready To Die" 20th Anniversary Thread
- Thread starter Rapmastermind
- Start date
I miss that era of hip hop so damn much
Knicksman20
Superstar
Me too Fam. 94/95 was probably the illest era for us fans. When you listened to the radio the majority of hip hop music was good. I don't even listen to the radio anymore.
Rapmastermind
Superstar
Whosampled.com teamed up with waxpoetics to released a "Ready To Die" 20th Anniversary mix. According to Whosampled.com Biggie has been sampled over 1,000 times:
http://www.whosampled.com/The-Notorious-B.I.G./
http://www.whosampled.com/The-Notorious-B.I.G./
Wallychamp
Kings Lose Crowns, Teachers Stay Intelligent
Subs
Rapmastermind
Superstar
Years ago DJ Semi did this great mixtape full of "Ready To Die" OG's:
/cover.jpg)
00:00 01. Intro (Original Version) *Uncleared Samples*
03:10 02. Things Done Changed (Original Version)
07:05 03. Gimme The Loot (Uncensored Version)
12:10 04. Machine Gun Funk (DJ Premier Version)
15:33 05. Warning (Original Version)
19:14 06. Ready To Die (Original Version) *Different Beat*
22:59 07. One More Chance (Original Version) *Uncleared Sample*
27:54 08. fukk Me (Interlude)
29:23 09. The What (Ft. Method Man) (Original Version) *Unheard Lyrics*
33:17 10. Juicy (Pete Rock Version)
37:52 11. Everyday Struggle (Original Demo Mix)
43:07 12. Me & My bytch (Original Version) *Different Beat*
46:46 13. Respect (Original Extended Version)
52:23 14. Friend Of Mine (Original Demo Version)
55:50 15. Whatchu Want (Unreleased Original Version)
59:25 16. Suicidal Thoughts (Pete Rock Version)
1:02:24 17. Come On (Ft. Sadat X) (Unreleased Original Version)
1:07:21 18. Who Shot Ya? (Original Demo Mix)
1:08:41 19. For The Macs And Dons (Unreleased Track)
1:12:02 20. Pepsi Freestyle (Unreleased Track)
1:13:12 21. Biggie Got The Hype shyt (Unreleased 1991 Demo Track)
00:00 01. Intro (Original Version) *Uncleared Samples*
03:10 02. Things Done Changed (Original Version)
07:05 03. Gimme The Loot (Uncensored Version)
12:10 04. Machine Gun Funk (DJ Premier Version)
15:33 05. Warning (Original Version)
19:14 06. Ready To Die (Original Version) *Different Beat*
22:59 07. One More Chance (Original Version) *Uncleared Sample*
27:54 08. fukk Me (Interlude)
29:23 09. The What (Ft. Method Man) (Original Version) *Unheard Lyrics*
33:17 10. Juicy (Pete Rock Version)
37:52 11. Everyday Struggle (Original Demo Mix)
43:07 12. Me & My bytch (Original Version) *Different Beat*
46:46 13. Respect (Original Extended Version)
52:23 14. Friend Of Mine (Original Demo Version)
55:50 15. Whatchu Want (Unreleased Original Version)
59:25 16. Suicidal Thoughts (Pete Rock Version)
1:02:24 17. Come On (Ft. Sadat X) (Unreleased Original Version)
1:07:21 18. Who Shot Ya? (Original Demo Mix)
1:08:41 19. For The Macs And Dons (Unreleased Track)
1:12:02 20. Pepsi Freestyle (Unreleased Track)
1:13:12 21. Biggie Got The Hype shyt (Unreleased 1991 Demo Track)
Last edited:
"Aint Nothing Shine Brighter Than That Bad Boy" The Inside Story of Hip-Hop's Most Notorious Label
An oral history of how Puff Daddy, Biggie Smalls, an army of rappers, and an ocean of champagne changed hip-hop forever
By Craig Barboza
September 2014
Biggie Smalls's landmark album Ready to Die produced by Sean Combs, came out twenty years ago this month on September 13, 1994. Photo: Dana Lizenberg
1. From Ashy to Classy
The first album released by Bad Boy Entertainment—twenty years ago this month—was the Notorious B.I.G.'s Ready to Die, an instant classic and possibly the most influential rap record ever made. For Sean "Puff Daddy" Combs, the label's founder, it was the first in a remarkable streak of commercial hits: twenty-one straight gold- or platinum-selling albums, including Puff's own Grammy-winning debut, No Way Out, plus home-grown artists like Faith Evans, the Lox, Mase, Total, and 112. By the mid-1990s, Bad Boy was the biggest label in pop music. This is the story of how it all began.
Jadakiss (rapper, the Lox): Getting on Bad Boy was like being the top pick in the draft, going to play with the Bulls when Mike was there. It put the battery in our back.
Janelle Monáe (singer, Bad Boy artist): Bad Boy was proof that the American Dream was real for hardworking young black artists in the '90s, just like it had been real for Berry Gordy and all my soul and funk heroes at Motown in the '60s and '70s. When I graduated high school, I headed straight to New York. That's where Broadway was. That's where Puff was.
Russell Simmons (co-founder of Def Jam): Everything Puffy touched was golden. He just made hit after hit after hit.
Combs in the early years. Photo: Ernie Paniciolli
Sean "Puff Daddy" Combs: I remember waking up one day and I had six of the Top 10 records. As a producer, I had taken over the charts. Everybody wanted a piece of that Bad Boy sound.
Gabrielle Union (actress): Every jam was like, "Aaawww, shyt." Y'know, one hand covering your face, the other in the air.
Andre Harrell (founder of Uptown Records, Combs's mentor): Puff was a great groovemaker, and whoever controls the groove controls the attitude.
Cheo Coker (journalist, Notorious screenwriter): Ready to Die is one of the first records to tell the perspective of the street-corner drug dealer that wasn't all fantasy and gloss. It wasn't kingpin, Scarface-type stuff. It was similar to what Richard Price did with Clockers. But Biggie didn't take 500 pages. He took an hour of your time, and you could dance to it.
Jessica Rosenblum (party promoter): We could be anywhere—in Palladium or a club in D.C.—Puffy always walked around with a bottle in his hand. Biggie had a bottle. They understood the fantasy. When Bad Boy first started doing videos with mansions and all that, nobody was actually living that way yet. It was a projection of what was to come. Bad Boy sold a dream.
···
(Clockwise from far left) Combs with Blige and Harrell at Uptown Records; front page of the New York Daily News the day after the CCNY tragedy; Bad Boy's girl group Total. Photo: Ramond Boyd/ Michael Ochs Archives/ Getty Images: NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images
2. "This Guy's Not Normal. He's Special."
Sean Combs was born in Harlem, and after earning a rep as a party promoter at Howard University in the late 1980s, he landed an internship at Uptown Records, where he helped the label's founder, Andre Harrell, popularize a new R&B sound known as New Jack Swing. (Think: Control-era Janet Jackson, early Bobby Brown.) Almost immediately Combs proved he was capable of being more than just an errand boy; he began developing his own artists, including Mary J. Blige, and promoting his own shows.
Rosenblum: I called him Tuffy for three weeks. I thought his name was Tuffy. I'd already been in nightlife for several years, but somehow we became fast partners, doing events on an equal footing. People would ask, "Why are you putting on this 19-year-old hip-hop kid?" And I'd say, "You don't understand. This guy's not normal. He's special."
Jodeci, Combs's first producing success. Photo: Ernie Paniciolli
Kathy Nelson (head of MCA soundtracks): I remember going to a meeting to watch a video for one of Andre's artists. Puff was in charge of it. We're looking at the rough cut, and Puffy's got himself in the video. I was like, "Oh... Okay!" [laughs] But the video was great, so who cared?
In 1991, Combs organized a concert to follow a charity basketball game at the City College of New York. But the event was oversold, causing a violent stampede when the doors opened for the show. Nine people were killed. The tragedy was national news, feeding early stereotypes about the dangers of rap, and it nearly derailed Combs's career before it began.
Kirk Burrowes (general manager, Bad Boy): Uptown's parent company, MCA, wanted to fire him, and he was waiting for the politicians and New York citizens to calm down, waiting on the police investigations to resolve what happened. It was a long, dragged-out thing, but Andre worked his magic. MCA gave Puff another chance.
Combs: I got an opportunity one night when [mega-successful R&B producer] Teddy Riley didn't show up to the studio. He had a session at Chung King, this famous studio downtown. So I said, I'm just gonna utilize this time. I had this idea, which was influenced by the mixtapes of Brucie B. and Kid Capri: They would blend hip-hop beats with R&B a cappellas. I took one of Jodeci's a cappellas and put an EPMD beat underneath it, and it was the first record I produced: "Come and Talk to Me," the remix.
Coker: Blending an R&B record with a hip-hop beat seems so elementary. It seems like peanut butter and jelly. But when you're the first to figure out PB&J tastes good together, it's going to propel your career, and that's what Puffy did.
An oral history of how Puff Daddy, Biggie Smalls, an army of rappers, and an ocean of champagne changed hip-hop forever
By Craig Barboza
September 2014
1. From Ashy to Classy
The first album released by Bad Boy Entertainment—twenty years ago this month—was the Notorious B.I.G.'s Ready to Die, an instant classic and possibly the most influential rap record ever made. For Sean "Puff Daddy" Combs, the label's founder, it was the first in a remarkable streak of commercial hits: twenty-one straight gold- or platinum-selling albums, including Puff's own Grammy-winning debut, No Way Out, plus home-grown artists like Faith Evans, the Lox, Mase, Total, and 112. By the mid-1990s, Bad Boy was the biggest label in pop music. This is the story of how it all began.
Jadakiss (rapper, the Lox): Getting on Bad Boy was like being the top pick in the draft, going to play with the Bulls when Mike was there. It put the battery in our back.
Janelle Monáe (singer, Bad Boy artist): Bad Boy was proof that the American Dream was real for hardworking young black artists in the '90s, just like it had been real for Berry Gordy and all my soul and funk heroes at Motown in the '60s and '70s. When I graduated high school, I headed straight to New York. That's where Broadway was. That's where Puff was.
Russell Simmons (co-founder of Def Jam): Everything Puffy touched was golden. He just made hit after hit after hit.
Combs in the early years. Photo: Ernie Paniciolli
Sean "Puff Daddy" Combs: I remember waking up one day and I had six of the Top 10 records. As a producer, I had taken over the charts. Everybody wanted a piece of that Bad Boy sound.
Gabrielle Union (actress): Every jam was like, "Aaawww, shyt." Y'know, one hand covering your face, the other in the air.
Andre Harrell (founder of Uptown Records, Combs's mentor): Puff was a great groovemaker, and whoever controls the groove controls the attitude.
Cheo Coker (journalist, Notorious screenwriter): Ready to Die is one of the first records to tell the perspective of the street-corner drug dealer that wasn't all fantasy and gloss. It wasn't kingpin, Scarface-type stuff. It was similar to what Richard Price did with Clockers. But Biggie didn't take 500 pages. He took an hour of your time, and you could dance to it.
Jessica Rosenblum (party promoter): We could be anywhere—in Palladium or a club in D.C.—Puffy always walked around with a bottle in his hand. Biggie had a bottle. They understood the fantasy. When Bad Boy first started doing videos with mansions and all that, nobody was actually living that way yet. It was a projection of what was to come. Bad Boy sold a dream.
···
(Clockwise from far left) Combs with Blige and Harrell at Uptown Records; front page of the New York Daily News the day after the CCNY tragedy; Bad Boy's girl group Total. Photo: Ramond Boyd/ Michael Ochs Archives/ Getty Images: NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images
2. "This Guy's Not Normal. He's Special."
Sean Combs was born in Harlem, and after earning a rep as a party promoter at Howard University in the late 1980s, he landed an internship at Uptown Records, where he helped the label's founder, Andre Harrell, popularize a new R&B sound known as New Jack Swing. (Think: Control-era Janet Jackson, early Bobby Brown.) Almost immediately Combs proved he was capable of being more than just an errand boy; he began developing his own artists, including Mary J. Blige, and promoting his own shows.
Rosenblum: I called him Tuffy for three weeks. I thought his name was Tuffy. I'd already been in nightlife for several years, but somehow we became fast partners, doing events on an equal footing. People would ask, "Why are you putting on this 19-year-old hip-hop kid?" And I'd say, "You don't understand. This guy's not normal. He's special."
Jodeci, Combs's first producing success. Photo: Ernie Paniciolli
Kathy Nelson (head of MCA soundtracks): I remember going to a meeting to watch a video for one of Andre's artists. Puff was in charge of it. We're looking at the rough cut, and Puffy's got himself in the video. I was like, "Oh... Okay!" [laughs] But the video was great, so who cared?
In 1991, Combs organized a concert to follow a charity basketball game at the City College of New York. But the event was oversold, causing a violent stampede when the doors opened for the show. Nine people were killed. The tragedy was national news, feeding early stereotypes about the dangers of rap, and it nearly derailed Combs's career before it began.
Kirk Burrowes (general manager, Bad Boy): Uptown's parent company, MCA, wanted to fire him, and he was waiting for the politicians and New York citizens to calm down, waiting on the police investigations to resolve what happened. It was a long, dragged-out thing, but Andre worked his magic. MCA gave Puff another chance.
Combs: I got an opportunity one night when [mega-successful R&B producer] Teddy Riley didn't show up to the studio. He had a session at Chung King, this famous studio downtown. So I said, I'm just gonna utilize this time. I had this idea, which was influenced by the mixtapes of Brucie B. and Kid Capri: They would blend hip-hop beats with R&B a cappellas. I took one of Jodeci's a cappellas and put an EPMD beat underneath it, and it was the first record I produced: "Come and Talk to Me," the remix.
Coker: Blending an R&B record with a hip-hop beat seems so elementary. It seems like peanut butter and jelly. But when you're the first to figure out PB&J tastes good together, it's going to propel your career, and that's what Puffy did.
···
Mase; Combs with Biggie. Photo: Hugh Edwards/IPOLl/ Globe Photos: Jonathan Mannion
3. Big Time
At Uptown, Combs became one of the label's hottest producers. In addition to Jodeci, he created hit records for Mary J. Blige, Father MC, and Heavy D. But as his profile rose, his unpredictable behavior began to grate on his co-workers, and before long Combs and his mentor, Harrell, were at each other's throats. At around the same time, Combs was introduced to a young Brooklyn rapper named Christopher Wallace, a.k.a. Biggie Smalls.
Sybil Pennix (staff member, Uptown): I was Puffy's assistant and Andre's go-to person to keep track of Puffy and his craziness. Many days we would have a planned meeting and Puffy could not be found. When he finally arrived, he'd just lie on the conference table and perform antics to get everyone's blood to rise. He thrived on drama.
Combs: I was always very dramatic—I still am, you know.
Chucky Thompson (producer, the Hitmen): He is the master of motivation. He would motivate you by using psychological tactics. In other words, he would straight mind-fukk you! [laughs]
The Lox. Photo: Jonathan Mannion
Gary Harris (music-industry vet and Uptown founding staff member): After a while, managing Puff was becoming a nightmare for Andre.
Harrell: I don't want to rehash this joint anymore. I'm gonna let that one go.
Combs: It was my fault. I kind of embodied that hip-hop attitude and spirit, and I rebelled a little bit too much.
Misa Hylton (fashion consultant and Combs's first love): I remember the day it got real. Andre fired Sean, and we gave it a week before I reached out to see if Sean could get his position back, as I was pregnant—in my first trimester. Dre said, "No!" At that point, I became the biggest cheerleader, encourager, and advocate for Sean starting his label. I was never worried, not one bit.
Matty C (journalist, The Source): I was in charge of the Unsigned Hype column in 1993. Puff called me up. I told him I had someone I'd just put in my column who I thought he'd like. And he said, "Come play me some stuff."
Combs: My mind was blown. I knew instantly that Big was the greatest rapper I ever heard. It was like witnessing a miracle or something.
Easy Mo Bee (producer): At that time, the West Coast sound [led by N.W.A members Eazy-E, Ice Cube, and Dr. Dre, as well as a young Tupac Shakur] was winning. Big time.
Mel Smith (senior vice president of promotions, Bad Boy): On the East Coast, nobody was making hardcore records. Our records were about girls, how fly you were, and how bad your car was. N.W.A was about that thug street stuff. Biggie brought that world to life. I told Puff, "This is groundbreaking."
Mary J. Blige (singer and Combs's protégée at Uptown Records): Biggie was one of the nicest people you could meet—so quiet. He'd post on the wall, waiting his turn. But when he hit the booth... Damn!
After Combs was fired from Uptown, he shopped around for a parent company to help him set up his own label, which he planned to call Bad Boy Entertainment. Many people in the music business thought he was crazy: Who would back an unruly, loudmouthed A&R kid who'd just been fired by his mentor?
Blige: He was determined. Like, Puffy is a determined guy. And he's not going to let anything stop him. He constantly says that: "I'm not gonna stop!" He just kept going as if nothing happened. If it affected him in any kind of way, he didn't let us know it.
Simmons: It looked like Puffy was finished a hundred times; it don't make no difference. No matter how many times you stab him, Puff ain't gonna lay down. He's a survivor. He'll reinvent himself.
Kenny Meiselas (Combs's lawyer): Within a short period of time we had the deal with Clive Davis at Arista Records, and we basically got all the acts we signed at Uptown, except Biggie. We had to negotiate to buy Biggie out of his agreement [with MCA].
Combs: This was when they started shutting down hip-hop clubs around the country. So when we negotiated for Biggie, MCA was like, "Sure." They just knew him as a gangster rapper. They didn't know how talented he was.
Biggie and Faith Evans. Photo: Eric Johnson
···
4. The Bad Boy Family
Combs's notion of what a music label could be was influenced by Motown—the music he grew up on. He wanted Bad Boy to have a unique sound, which he cultivated with the help of his in-house production team, the Hitmen, as well as a sense of community among his artists. Together they came to be known as Puff Daddy and the Family. In August 1994, two of his biggest stars, Faith Evans and Biggie Smalls, met at a photo shoot and soon became family for real.
Harve Pierre (president, Bad Boy): Scarsdale, New York. Six Kolbert Drive. That was our first office. It was where Puff was living at the time. We worked out of the basement.
June Balloon (street team, Bad Boy): Everyone had their little station. You had people writing songs, producers working on beats. It was like a boot camp. And the guys were always hungry, because food around there was expensive. I used to come all the way from Queens to bring them Chinese food. One day Puff flipped out because the guys were starving so bad they ate Misa's food. Puff was like, "Who the fukk is eating a pregnant woman's food?"
Keisha Epps (singer, 1990s girl group Total): Puffy was very hands-on, and he didn't take any slack—none. Of course, no singer should smoke cigarettes. But I did, and one day I took a break to sneak a couple puffs. He found out and damn near kicked down the restroom door. He was screaming not to mess up his money. I'm like, "Puffy, just wait. I'm not a child." Finally I opened the door, and he said, in his most quiet voice, "Now, were you smoking?" I said, "Yes, but—" Before I could finish, he said, "Get your shyt and go home. There's no studio for you today. Or evvvverrrr, if I catch you smoking again." I left. That was one of many memorable moments with Puffy. He would be happy to hear that I stopped.
Mase; Combs with Biggie. Photo: Hugh Edwards/IPOLl/ Globe Photos: Jonathan Mannion
3. Big Time
At Uptown, Combs became one of the label's hottest producers. In addition to Jodeci, he created hit records for Mary J. Blige, Father MC, and Heavy D. But as his profile rose, his unpredictable behavior began to grate on his co-workers, and before long Combs and his mentor, Harrell, were at each other's throats. At around the same time, Combs was introduced to a young Brooklyn rapper named Christopher Wallace, a.k.a. Biggie Smalls.
Sybil Pennix (staff member, Uptown): I was Puffy's assistant and Andre's go-to person to keep track of Puffy and his craziness. Many days we would have a planned meeting and Puffy could not be found. When he finally arrived, he'd just lie on the conference table and perform antics to get everyone's blood to rise. He thrived on drama.
Combs: I was always very dramatic—I still am, you know.
Chucky Thompson (producer, the Hitmen): He is the master of motivation. He would motivate you by using psychological tactics. In other words, he would straight mind-fukk you! [laughs]
The Lox. Photo: Jonathan Mannion
Gary Harris (music-industry vet and Uptown founding staff member): After a while, managing Puff was becoming a nightmare for Andre.
Harrell: I don't want to rehash this joint anymore. I'm gonna let that one go.
Combs: It was my fault. I kind of embodied that hip-hop attitude and spirit, and I rebelled a little bit too much.
Misa Hylton (fashion consultant and Combs's first love): I remember the day it got real. Andre fired Sean, and we gave it a week before I reached out to see if Sean could get his position back, as I was pregnant—in my first trimester. Dre said, "No!" At that point, I became the biggest cheerleader, encourager, and advocate for Sean starting his label. I was never worried, not one bit.
Matty C (journalist, The Source): I was in charge of the Unsigned Hype column in 1993. Puff called me up. I told him I had someone I'd just put in my column who I thought he'd like. And he said, "Come play me some stuff."
Combs: My mind was blown. I knew instantly that Big was the greatest rapper I ever heard. It was like witnessing a miracle or something.
Easy Mo Bee (producer): At that time, the West Coast sound [led by N.W.A members Eazy-E, Ice Cube, and Dr. Dre, as well as a young Tupac Shakur] was winning. Big time.
Mel Smith (senior vice president of promotions, Bad Boy): On the East Coast, nobody was making hardcore records. Our records were about girls, how fly you were, and how bad your car was. N.W.A was about that thug street stuff. Biggie brought that world to life. I told Puff, "This is groundbreaking."
Mary J. Blige (singer and Combs's protégée at Uptown Records): Biggie was one of the nicest people you could meet—so quiet. He'd post on the wall, waiting his turn. But when he hit the booth... Damn!
After Combs was fired from Uptown, he shopped around for a parent company to help him set up his own label, which he planned to call Bad Boy Entertainment. Many people in the music business thought he was crazy: Who would back an unruly, loudmouthed A&R kid who'd just been fired by his mentor?
Blige: He was determined. Like, Puffy is a determined guy. And he's not going to let anything stop him. He constantly says that: "I'm not gonna stop!" He just kept going as if nothing happened. If it affected him in any kind of way, he didn't let us know it.
Simmons: It looked like Puffy was finished a hundred times; it don't make no difference. No matter how many times you stab him, Puff ain't gonna lay down. He's a survivor. He'll reinvent himself.
Kenny Meiselas (Combs's lawyer): Within a short period of time we had the deal with Clive Davis at Arista Records, and we basically got all the acts we signed at Uptown, except Biggie. We had to negotiate to buy Biggie out of his agreement [with MCA].
Combs: This was when they started shutting down hip-hop clubs around the country. So when we negotiated for Biggie, MCA was like, "Sure." They just knew him as a gangster rapper. They didn't know how talented he was.
Biggie and Faith Evans. Photo: Eric Johnson
···
4. The Bad Boy Family
Combs's notion of what a music label could be was influenced by Motown—the music he grew up on. He wanted Bad Boy to have a unique sound, which he cultivated with the help of his in-house production team, the Hitmen, as well as a sense of community among his artists. Together they came to be known as Puff Daddy and the Family. In August 1994, two of his biggest stars, Faith Evans and Biggie Smalls, met at a photo shoot and soon became family for real.
Harve Pierre (president, Bad Boy): Scarsdale, New York. Six Kolbert Drive. That was our first office. It was where Puff was living at the time. We worked out of the basement.
June Balloon (street team, Bad Boy): Everyone had their little station. You had people writing songs, producers working on beats. It was like a boot camp. And the guys were always hungry, because food around there was expensive. I used to come all the way from Queens to bring them Chinese food. One day Puff flipped out because the guys were starving so bad they ate Misa's food. Puff was like, "Who the fukk is eating a pregnant woman's food?"
Keisha Epps (singer, 1990s girl group Total): Puffy was very hands-on, and he didn't take any slack—none. Of course, no singer should smoke cigarettes. But I did, and one day I took a break to sneak a couple puffs. He found out and damn near kicked down the restroom door. He was screaming not to mess up his money. I'm like, "Puffy, just wait. I'm not a child." Finally I opened the door, and he said, in his most quiet voice, "Now, were you smoking?" I said, "Yes, but—" Before I could finish, he said, "Get your shyt and go home. There's no studio for you today. Or evvvverrrr, if I catch you smoking again." I left. That was one of many memorable moments with Puffy. He would be happy to hear that I stopped.
Faith Evans (singer): Before Big and I broke the [marriage] news to Puff, people made it sound like we were in trouble: "Did y'all tell Puff?" We didn't see the big deal. Puff was like, "What, are you kidding me!" Big said, "Yeah, this is my wife. That's it. We outta here."
Harris: Radio was a big hurdle. You didn't get the radio exposure for rap records that you get now. The most successful rap records were regional.
Smith: Rap was like somebody's dirty little sister who dances at the strip club. That's how they treated us.
Harris: The Chronic changed that to a large extent, because [Dr. Dre's parent label] Interscope was able to get a lot of Top 40 play. Then Bad Boy came in on the updraft. In the summer of 1994, Bad Boy had the crazy one-two punch of [Craig Mack's] "Flava in Ya Ear" and [the Notorious B.I.G.'s] "Juicy."
Lil' Kim, whose affair with Biggie strained his marriage. Photo: Corbis Outline: Fana Lixenberg
Combs: I've always had this thing, even to this day, that if you're gonna do it, do it big. Be disruptive and make releases exciting. Nobody ever had the gall to release two artists at one time. So I was like, I'ma shake the game up. I'ma make MCA and Andre regret firing me. I wanted vengeance, in a positive way.
Easy Mo Bee: I made that "Flava" beat while standing in my drawers one morning. It took twenty-five minutes. At the time, I was real busy. I'd already started working on Biggie's stuff, and I remember [Biggie's breakout hit] "Juicy" was the song I didn't want to do. Puffy asked me first. He said, "Yo, Mo. Loop up that 'Juicy Fruit' joint by [early-'80s funk group] Mtume for me." And I just looked at him like, "You serious, man?" If you were just looping, you weren't really working.
Combs: One of my strengths was sampling—to try and give people the feeling I got growing up in the '70s and '80s. I remember watching Soul Train and dancing in my living room with my mother. I wanted to fuse those elements with what was going on at the time with "gangsta rap," or reality rap. "Juicy Fruit" was a record that always felt like summertime in the city.
Easy Mo Bee: Do I regret not working on "Juicy"? Damn right, I do! [laughs] I wish I would've looped that record up. I ain't gonna lie. Yo, Puff. If you can hear me, I dropped the ball on that one.
···
5. The Birth of Bottle Service
Q Parker (singer, R&B quartet 112): We watched Craig get his hit. Big get all his hits. Faith. Total. Man, our on-base percentage was crazy! Everybody was hitting, whether it was a home run, a single, a double. You didn't want to be the artist that struck out or couldn't bring home a teammate.
Funkmaster Flex (club DJ, radio host): Puff single-handedly brought champagne to mean something. If it wasn't for Bad Boy, there'd be no bottle service in clubs.
Thompson: Money, cars, jewelry, champagne, baby mommas. [laughs] It was an exciting time. Oh, and did I mention the houses?
Parker: It didn't really hit us until we moved to New York. The first thing we did was go to Big's "One More Chance" video shoot in Brooklyn, and we were just looking around at all these musical giants, like, "Oh, my God. There goes Mary! That's Heavy D! Look at Aaliyah!" I mean, dude, you name it. It was like a big cookout.
Biggie and Puff at a Soul Train Awards afterparty in 1997 on the night Biggie was murdered. Photo: Maury L. Phillips
Mase (rapper): Before I met Puff, I was sleeping on the floor of a one-bedroom apartment in Harlem, splitting White Castle. You know how small White Castle burgers are, right? My man Cudda sold his Acura so we could fly down to Jack the Rapper [an Atlanta hip-hop convention]. We was going to meet Jermaine Dupri, but they wouldn't let us speak to him. Then I bumped into Puff on the dance floor.
Combs: He was just so charismatic. With most of the artists I sign, it's love at first sight.
Balloon: The ladies love Mase. This one night, we were leaving the club. Everyone hops into the fifteen-passenger van, and these chicks run in the van and right in front of everyone they start sucking Mase's dikk! Now they fighting to see who's gonna catch the nut. I mean, it's crazy, and Mase goes, "Wait, hold up. Y'all can't be having my dikk go all these different directions. Calm down." One girl's on the phone like, "I told you I was gonna get Mase. bytch, I told you."
Epps: I remember Big screaming at us for trying to send the groupies home. There'd be flocks of girls at the hotel in each city, waiting to be called upstairs. We'd tell them, "You probably won't see Big or Puff, because you have to go through their boys first." Some cared. Most didn't.
Balloon: By the time we hit the Days Inn, all the girls is in the lobby and it's "pick a winner," basically. We had a name for that: Groupie Appreciation Day.
···
6. The Gordon Gekko of Hip-Hop
Bad Boy and Sean Combs were on top of the world. But working for Bad Boy, and particularly for Combs, wasn't always a party. The boss was tireless and tyrannical, and he never let a dollar go unchased.
Jayson Jackson (marketing executive, Bad Boy Records): It's an unspoken rule in the music business that pretty much after Thanksgiving, it's a wrap. But for Puff, that's the time when you need to be setting up a rap record, because everyone's home from college, people are out partying. So he's like, "I don't give a fukk what's happening in the larger music business; we're gonna be working!" People were livid. Then he doesn't give out bonus checks. Two days before Christmas, he makes us come into the office to get them. At 10 A.M. he's calling everybody to see who's not at their desk. Literally calling each person. By noon he calls a meeting in the lobby. We're all sitting there, waiting for him. The tension in the room, you could cut it with a knife.
Harris: Radio was a big hurdle. You didn't get the radio exposure for rap records that you get now. The most successful rap records were regional.
Smith: Rap was like somebody's dirty little sister who dances at the strip club. That's how they treated us.
Harris: The Chronic changed that to a large extent, because [Dr. Dre's parent label] Interscope was able to get a lot of Top 40 play. Then Bad Boy came in on the updraft. In the summer of 1994, Bad Boy had the crazy one-two punch of [Craig Mack's] "Flava in Ya Ear" and [the Notorious B.I.G.'s] "Juicy."
Lil' Kim, whose affair with Biggie strained his marriage. Photo: Corbis Outline: Fana Lixenberg
Combs: I've always had this thing, even to this day, that if you're gonna do it, do it big. Be disruptive and make releases exciting. Nobody ever had the gall to release two artists at one time. So I was like, I'ma shake the game up. I'ma make MCA and Andre regret firing me. I wanted vengeance, in a positive way.
Easy Mo Bee: I made that "Flava" beat while standing in my drawers one morning. It took twenty-five minutes. At the time, I was real busy. I'd already started working on Biggie's stuff, and I remember [Biggie's breakout hit] "Juicy" was the song I didn't want to do. Puffy asked me first. He said, "Yo, Mo. Loop up that 'Juicy Fruit' joint by [early-'80s funk group] Mtume for me." And I just looked at him like, "You serious, man?" If you were just looping, you weren't really working.
Combs: One of my strengths was sampling—to try and give people the feeling I got growing up in the '70s and '80s. I remember watching Soul Train and dancing in my living room with my mother. I wanted to fuse those elements with what was going on at the time with "gangsta rap," or reality rap. "Juicy Fruit" was a record that always felt like summertime in the city.
Easy Mo Bee: Do I regret not working on "Juicy"? Damn right, I do! [laughs] I wish I would've looped that record up. I ain't gonna lie. Yo, Puff. If you can hear me, I dropped the ball on that one.
···
5. The Birth of Bottle Service
Q Parker (singer, R&B quartet 112): We watched Craig get his hit. Big get all his hits. Faith. Total. Man, our on-base percentage was crazy! Everybody was hitting, whether it was a home run, a single, a double. You didn't want to be the artist that struck out or couldn't bring home a teammate.
Funkmaster Flex (club DJ, radio host): Puff single-handedly brought champagne to mean something. If it wasn't for Bad Boy, there'd be no bottle service in clubs.
Thompson: Money, cars, jewelry, champagne, baby mommas. [laughs] It was an exciting time. Oh, and did I mention the houses?
Parker: It didn't really hit us until we moved to New York. The first thing we did was go to Big's "One More Chance" video shoot in Brooklyn, and we were just looking around at all these musical giants, like, "Oh, my God. There goes Mary! That's Heavy D! Look at Aaliyah!" I mean, dude, you name it. It was like a big cookout.
Mase (rapper): Before I met Puff, I was sleeping on the floor of a one-bedroom apartment in Harlem, splitting White Castle. You know how small White Castle burgers are, right? My man Cudda sold his Acura so we could fly down to Jack the Rapper [an Atlanta hip-hop convention]. We was going to meet Jermaine Dupri, but they wouldn't let us speak to him. Then I bumped into Puff on the dance floor.
Combs: He was just so charismatic. With most of the artists I sign, it's love at first sight.
Balloon: The ladies love Mase. This one night, we were leaving the club. Everyone hops into the fifteen-passenger van, and these chicks run in the van and right in front of everyone they start sucking Mase's dikk! Now they fighting to see who's gonna catch the nut. I mean, it's crazy, and Mase goes, "Wait, hold up. Y'all can't be having my dikk go all these different directions. Calm down." One girl's on the phone like, "I told you I was gonna get Mase. bytch, I told you."
Epps: I remember Big screaming at us for trying to send the groupies home. There'd be flocks of girls at the hotel in each city, waiting to be called upstairs. We'd tell them, "You probably won't see Big or Puff, because you have to go through their boys first." Some cared. Most didn't.
Balloon: By the time we hit the Days Inn, all the girls is in the lobby and it's "pick a winner," basically. We had a name for that: Groupie Appreciation Day.
···
6. The Gordon Gekko of Hip-Hop
Bad Boy and Sean Combs were on top of the world. But working for Bad Boy, and particularly for Combs, wasn't always a party. The boss was tireless and tyrannical, and he never let a dollar go unchased.
Jayson Jackson (marketing executive, Bad Boy Records): It's an unspoken rule in the music business that pretty much after Thanksgiving, it's a wrap. But for Puff, that's the time when you need to be setting up a rap record, because everyone's home from college, people are out partying. So he's like, "I don't give a fukk what's happening in the larger music business; we're gonna be working!" People were livid. Then he doesn't give out bonus checks. Two days before Christmas, he makes us come into the office to get them. At 10 A.M. he's calling everybody to see who's not at their desk. Literally calling each person. By noon he calls a meeting in the lobby. We're all sitting there, waiting for him. The tension in the room, you could cut it with a knife.
Continued (page 4 of 4)
He steps off the elevator with his bodyguards. He's got on a mink coat, dripping jewels, sunglasses. Looks at everybody. Goes to his office. Gets something to drink. I don't know, some juice. He's an apple-juice fiend. Keeps us waiting another five minutes, comes back, sits down, and looks at the room and says, "Y'all are mad as fukk, ain't you?" We know he's got bonus checks, so nobody's saying shyt. And reading the room, he's like, "You see me sitting here with my fur and all of that and you like, 'fukk Puff.' But you know what? I dare one of y'all to come get it. I dare one of you to work harder than me. To come get what I got."
He launches into this Gordon Gekko-like sermon, like, "I come in here and work harder than you in the day, then go to the club and work. You think I'm in the club getting drunk? I'm looking at who's dancing to what, figuring out which song is working in what way, which DJ is making it hot. Tell me who's doing that more than me?"
I was just sitting there like, Holy shyt. Who he is hit me. He sleeps no more than four hours a night. And every waking hour, he's figuring out how to make more money.
I've always said he's the greediest and most driven person I've ever met—like, his greed is disgusting. Too much is never enough. But he's got a motivation and a drive that can match that greed. And when those two meet, it's magic. Biggie happens. Mase happens. He happens.
···
Biggie in his element. Photo: Jonathan Mannion
7. Pac and Big
As Bad Boy became a powerhouse, it also accumulated some powerful enemies. The feud with Death Row Records began with the unraveling friendship between Biggie and Tupac Shakur. After Shakur was robbed and shot at a New York studio in November 1994, he grew convinced that his former friend was somehow involved. Shortly after, Biggie released "Who Shot Ya," which featured lines that seemed to mock Shakur for his shooting. Seventeen months later, Shakur dropped his infamous response track, "Hit 'Em Up" (Who shot me? / But your punks didn't finish / Now you 'bout to feel the wrath of a menace). A rash of violence would claim both their lives over the next ten months. To this day, their murders remain unsolved.
Funkmaster Flex: "Who Shot Ya" was released after about three months of people saying Biggie was too commercial. It's like Puff was listening to the street and wanted to shut them up. When "Who Shot Ya" dropped, that was it. King of the street.
Coker: You have to understand what it was like to be on a dance floor when the DJ played a song like "Who Shot Ya." Beyond all the controversy, that record's incredible! You have to hear that record how it's supposed to be played—the way the highs and the lows cut through a few thousand people at three in the morning in a nightclub. There's no more compelling record on earth.
Easy Mo Bee: We all know Pac and Big grew to dislike each other, but I was there while the two were actually good friends. I just happened to be recording the Me Against the World album with Tupac in 1994 when he invited Big up to the studio. It was real crowded. Pac had his crew up in there. Biggie had his crew up in there. I had half of Lafayette Gardens up in there. So many people wanted to see this, because Big and Pac were considered MC heavyweights at that time. Later on, when I heard about the beef, it was a total mystery to me. I was like, "Yo, what happened? We was just in the studio."
Matty C: There was a period when a couple other sparks flew off, due to the natural jealousy and envy that occur when someone is on his way to the top. But that kind of posturing is just par for the course. It's bravado. That's all I see it as. And to be honest, that's the way I saw Suge's potshot at the Source Awards that supposedly started it all, where he said, "Any artist who wants to be an artist and wants to stay a star and don't want to worry about the producer trying to be all in the video, all on the record, dancing, come to Death Row."
Combs: The West Coast thing was heavy on our minds. It was worldwide news that we were supposedly having this musical war or whatever. But there have always been different rivalries in hip-hop. You would never think any of them would go in the direction where it would be dangerous. In retrospect, we probably should've just been safer.
···
8. Bad Boy for Life
Mase: After Big died, we were searching to see who was gonna carry the torch. Everybody would've had the right to get out of contracts because of the violence. Instead, we rolled together. If I had a verse or beat that was better for you, I'd just give it up. My verses on Puff's first few singles from No Way Out were records I wrote in that one-bedroom apartment in Harlem before I even got to the label. I gave them to Puff, because he was the one with the hot hand.
Harris: When Puff put out that first song, "Can't Nobody Hold Me Down," it wasn't clear just how important he was going to be as an artist—that he was going to do an album himself that would sell 7 million units. Nobody saw that. Anybody who tells you they did, they're lying. Including him!
Combs: For maybe like seven years, I was the hip-hop artist with the most No. 1's in history. It was like I couldn't miss a shot.
Funkmaster Flex: I've been on the radio and in the clubs for every movement that's ever happened in hip-hop—from Sleeping Bag Records to Young Money/Cash Money. I'm telling you, ain't nothing shine brighter than that Bad Boy. Nothing had that energy.
http://www.gq.com/entertainment/celebrities/201409/bad-boy-hip-hop?currentPage=1
He steps off the elevator with his bodyguards. He's got on a mink coat, dripping jewels, sunglasses. Looks at everybody. Goes to his office. Gets something to drink. I don't know, some juice. He's an apple-juice fiend. Keeps us waiting another five minutes, comes back, sits down, and looks at the room and says, "Y'all are mad as fukk, ain't you?" We know he's got bonus checks, so nobody's saying shyt. And reading the room, he's like, "You see me sitting here with my fur and all of that and you like, 'fukk Puff.' But you know what? I dare one of y'all to come get it. I dare one of you to work harder than me. To come get what I got."
He launches into this Gordon Gekko-like sermon, like, "I come in here and work harder than you in the day, then go to the club and work. You think I'm in the club getting drunk? I'm looking at who's dancing to what, figuring out which song is working in what way, which DJ is making it hot. Tell me who's doing that more than me?"
I was just sitting there like, Holy shyt. Who he is hit me. He sleeps no more than four hours a night. And every waking hour, he's figuring out how to make more money.
I've always said he's the greediest and most driven person I've ever met—like, his greed is disgusting. Too much is never enough. But he's got a motivation and a drive that can match that greed. And when those two meet, it's magic. Biggie happens. Mase happens. He happens.
···
Biggie in his element. Photo: Jonathan Mannion
7. Pac and Big
As Bad Boy became a powerhouse, it also accumulated some powerful enemies. The feud with Death Row Records began with the unraveling friendship between Biggie and Tupac Shakur. After Shakur was robbed and shot at a New York studio in November 1994, he grew convinced that his former friend was somehow involved. Shortly after, Biggie released "Who Shot Ya," which featured lines that seemed to mock Shakur for his shooting. Seventeen months later, Shakur dropped his infamous response track, "Hit 'Em Up" (Who shot me? / But your punks didn't finish / Now you 'bout to feel the wrath of a menace). A rash of violence would claim both their lives over the next ten months. To this day, their murders remain unsolved.
Funkmaster Flex: "Who Shot Ya" was released after about three months of people saying Biggie was too commercial. It's like Puff was listening to the street and wanted to shut them up. When "Who Shot Ya" dropped, that was it. King of the street.
Coker: You have to understand what it was like to be on a dance floor when the DJ played a song like "Who Shot Ya." Beyond all the controversy, that record's incredible! You have to hear that record how it's supposed to be played—the way the highs and the lows cut through a few thousand people at three in the morning in a nightclub. There's no more compelling record on earth.
Easy Mo Bee: We all know Pac and Big grew to dislike each other, but I was there while the two were actually good friends. I just happened to be recording the Me Against the World album with Tupac in 1994 when he invited Big up to the studio. It was real crowded. Pac had his crew up in there. Biggie had his crew up in there. I had half of Lafayette Gardens up in there. So many people wanted to see this, because Big and Pac were considered MC heavyweights at that time. Later on, when I heard about the beef, it was a total mystery to me. I was like, "Yo, what happened? We was just in the studio."
Matty C: There was a period when a couple other sparks flew off, due to the natural jealousy and envy that occur when someone is on his way to the top. But that kind of posturing is just par for the course. It's bravado. That's all I see it as. And to be honest, that's the way I saw Suge's potshot at the Source Awards that supposedly started it all, where he said, "Any artist who wants to be an artist and wants to stay a star and don't want to worry about the producer trying to be all in the video, all on the record, dancing, come to Death Row."
Combs: The West Coast thing was heavy on our minds. It was worldwide news that we were supposedly having this musical war or whatever. But there have always been different rivalries in hip-hop. You would never think any of them would go in the direction where it would be dangerous. In retrospect, we probably should've just been safer.
···
8. Bad Boy for Life
Mase: After Big died, we were searching to see who was gonna carry the torch. Everybody would've had the right to get out of contracts because of the violence. Instead, we rolled together. If I had a verse or beat that was better for you, I'd just give it up. My verses on Puff's first few singles from No Way Out were records I wrote in that one-bedroom apartment in Harlem before I even got to the label. I gave them to Puff, because he was the one with the hot hand.
Harris: When Puff put out that first song, "Can't Nobody Hold Me Down," it wasn't clear just how important he was going to be as an artist—that he was going to do an album himself that would sell 7 million units. Nobody saw that. Anybody who tells you they did, they're lying. Including him!
Combs: For maybe like seven years, I was the hip-hop artist with the most No. 1's in history. It was like I couldn't miss a shot.
Funkmaster Flex: I've been on the radio and in the clubs for every movement that's ever happened in hip-hop—from Sleeping Bag Records to Young Money/Cash Money. I'm telling you, ain't nothing shine brighter than that Bad Boy. Nothing had that energy.
http://www.gq.com/entertainment/celebrities/201409/bad-boy-hip-hop?currentPage=1
Ready To Die Turns 20
Sep 12th '14 by Tom Breihan @ 9:35am 5 Comments
Word around the campfire is that Biggie Smalls, when he was recording Ready To Die, wanted to record a track with DJ Premier and M.O.P. and Jeru The Damaja. Can you even imagine what that would sound like? How fukking incredible that would’ve been? There are precious few Biggie/Premier collabs, but every last one of them is a solid-gold classic. Premier’s creative peak coincided exactly with Biggie’s all-too-brief career. And Biggie could do no wrong during those Ready To Die sessions. Imagine if he was on a track with three guys who knew that Premier sound inside and out. Biggie could be as raw and rugged as M.O.P., and he could be as intense and cerebral as Jeru. If he’d been on a track with those guys together, he would’ve had to be both at the same time, and he could’ve done it. But Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs vetoed the plan. And here’s what kills me: Puffy was right. He wanted Ready To Die to have a slick, populist sense of focus to it, and that’s exactly what it had. As much as I want to hear that hypothetical collab — and I would punch a puppy in the eye to hear it — it’s honestly better that the song never had a chance to exist. Ready To Die is, for my money, the best rap album ever made. It is as close to full-length perfection as rap music has ever come. I have a hard time believing that any extra song, even that song, could make it better. Best to leave Ready To Die alone, to let it be great.
There are a few non-Biggie voices on Ready To Die. There are those shards of older rap classics on the intro track, those sampled swirls of old soul songs. There are those breathy Puffy interjections. There’s reggae singer Diana King growling all over “Respect.” But there is only one guest-rapper on Ready To Die, and that turned out to be a very canny casting decision. The one guy is Method Man, easily the hottest rapper in New York at the time, a guy who carried a mysterious forbidding energy to everything he did. Meth, at his peak, had a dangerous sing-songy purr, a way of hopping around the track while staying dead in the pocket. Everything he said sounded cool as fukk. He had gravity. And he’s in peak form on “The What”: “I spit on your grave, then I grab my Charles dikkens.” And still, Method Man loses. It’s not close. It’s not even a fair fight. Meth was used to RZA’s broken-piano minor-key evilscapes, but producer Easy Mo Bee’s warm, gooey soul-sample lope gives Biggie home-field advantage. More to the point, Meth is still making goofy pop-culture references and silly jokes, talking about his six-shooter and his horse named Trigger. Biggie is pure, unrefined cold-bloodedness. All his threats are concrete and tangible. He’s not playing. He bellows every word. He ends his last verse with, “Yeah, thought so.” It’s a ridiculous display of bravado. This song was Biggie going toe-to-toe with the best guy in the city, winning, and then keeping it moving. If he’s done a bunch more songs with other rappers, it would’ve just been a distraction. He did what he had to do. It’s the way he operated. On Ready To Die, Biggie didn’t really work within the rap universe of 1994. He worked above it.
Every single song on Ready To Die sounds like the final word in an argument. “Juicy” remains the best up-from-nothing inspirational song in rap history, transcending because Biggie knew how to take the specifics of his own life and make them resonate as something bigger, something mythic: “I never thought it could happen, this rapping stuff / I was too used to packing gats and stuff.” He never works to make himself sound larger-than-life. Instead, he’s vulnerable and goofy, remembering taping mix shows on the radio and freezing when the landlord cut the heat off, and using those hardships to luxuriate in everything he’d earned. But for all his warmth, Biggie could be chillingly cold and violent. And it’s hard to imagine a better crime narrative than “Warning”: Biggie playing the two sides of a stressful conversation, slowly building tension, layering on details until those details take on their own character. “They heard about the pounds you got down in Georgetown / And they heard you got half of Virginia locked down” — another rapper could’ve made a whole album out of the backstory that that one line implies, but here it’s just another narrative touch, a piece of the puzzle. But when he does make threats, he’s tense and concise, never wasting words: “fukk around and get hardcore / C4 to your door, no beef no more.” It’s expert pulp-fiction storytelling, as vivid and brutal and economical as a Parker novel.
Biggie contained multitudes. The whole drug-kingpin character wasn’t exactly new in rap, but nobody had ever pulled it off with anything like Biggie’s level of panache. And he did it so well that everyone who came after, including his friend Jay-Z seemed to be playing catchup. But Biggie was, of course, never a kingpin. He was a midlevel street guy, and the album has even more power when he’s talking about the fears and hazards that come with that trade. He could confess to younger, dumber mistakes, sympathizing with his younger self but still conveying the idea that the decisions he was making were stupid ones: “Put the drugs on the shelf? Nah, I couldn’t see it / Scarface, King of New York, I wanna be it / Rap was secondary, money was necessary / Till I got incarcerated, kinda scary… Time to contemplate: Damn, where did I fail? / All the money I stacked was all the money for bail.”
If there’s a narrative thrust to Ready To Die, it’s in Biggie’s conflicts with his mother, a woman who would become famous as a public mourner after his death. On first song “Things Done Changed,” he’s describing the savage age he grew up in, but he’s reveling in it, not mourning the supposedly-more-innocent time that had passed. There’s a twinge of bitterness to the song (“Back in the day, our parents used to take care of us / Look at ’em now, they even fukkin’ scared of us”), but there are more threats, more boasts about the guns he’s carrying. Throughout the album, he mentions arguments with his mom, ignored advice, times when he got kicked out of the house. He lists his mother’s breast cancer as the reason he’s stressed. He gives off a vague impression that he knows he’s wrong during all his fights, but he never changes his ways. On the album-ending “Suicidal Thoughts,” he gets so deep into his own failings that he portrays himself killing himself, shooting himself in the head while he’s on the phone with Puff. It’s a weird and telling ending to such an otherwise-triumphant album, and a chilling listen in light of the way Biggie’s life would end just three years later. That ending, and those arguments with his mother, turn every moment of overcoming the odds into a hollow victory, and they add pathos to an album that could be exultant. On Ready To Die, every silver lining has a cloud.
I haven’t even mentioned Biggie’s voice yet, a booming clarion that cut through everything around it. That voice was malleable — he loved playing two different characters on the same song, and he could always make both of them distinct — but it was a bulldozer, not a finesse instrument. That voice was all blunt-voice power, which made it all the more startling when you noticed the writerly poise that went into so much of what Biggie was saying. There are turns of phrase on Ready To Die that couldn’t possibly be any better-crafted. “I don’t chase ’em, I replace ’em”: I think I giggled with stupid glee for 20 minutes the first time I heard that line. “How you living, Biggie Smalls? In mansion and Benzes, giving ends to my friends, and it feels stupendous”: That’s probably my favorite good-life line of all time, a note-perfect description of how good it feels to help the people around you. There’s a reason why so many rappers have stolen so many lines from Ready To Die at various points: When those lines entered your brain, they wouldn’t leave. (There’s also the reprehensible shyt, the robbing pregnant women and “talk slick, I beat you right.” But in the way the album discusses Biggie’s own failings, it’s possible to think of those moments as Biggie adding more moral wrinkles to his character. That’s how I’d like to think of them, anyway.)
It’s fascinating, these 20 years later, that an album this layered and thoughtful and intense ever worked as pop music, and the world has Sean Combs to thank for that. Puffy knew Biggie had a once-in-a-generation talent, and he knew that you could take someone as raw as Biggie and present him as a movie star by building songs like setpieces, sparing no production-value expenses and piling on the opulence. The samples are warm and lush and heavily orchestrated, sweetened with widescreen production touches like the ones Dr. Dre was applying on the other side of the country at the same time. There are so many perfect, subtle little flourishes on Ready To Die: The way the intro drums switch from one speaker channel to the other on “Things Done Changed,” the slight crackle on the phone line in “Warning,” the way Biggie’s voice doubles up on the phrase “New York, New York” on “Respect.” And songs like “One More Chance” and “Big Poppa” are so slickly textured that even Biggie’s massive voice feels calm and soothing.
In a way, Ready To Die sounds even more current 20 years later than Illmatic, the other impossible-not-to-discuss New York rap masterpiece of 1994 — and that was an album explicitly designed to stand outside of time. Ready To Die was focused on sounding current in 1994, but rap has never gotten over it, and we still have stars like Rick Ross who are trying to equal its sense of larger-than-life cool. Illmatic is an absolutely incredible album, but one of its greatest assets is the way Nas sounds like he’s lost in a dream, completely trapped within his own head. Biggie doesn’t sound like that. Even when he’s rapping about workaday struggles, he radiates impossible confidence. He was 21 and 22 when he was recording Ready To Die, and he sounded like he already knew he was the baddest motherfukker in the whole city. Think of how you were at 21 or 22. Imagine feeling that self-assured. It’s impossible. It doesn’t compute. And that’s one of the things about Biggie’s way-too-early death that stings the worst: If he sounded that confident, that put-together, at 21, how would he sound now? While you think about that, let’s watch some videos.
http://www.stereogum.com/1704713/ready-to-die-turns-20/franchises/the-anniversary/
Long Live the Teflon Don: The Rise of the Notorious B.I.G. and "Ready to Die"
By Rob Kenner
2 days ago
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Image via BET
Twenty years ago I was a senior editor at VIBE magazine, settling into my comfy new office with wall-to-wall green shag carpet, a sturdy wooden door, and two windows overlooking Lexington Avenue. Quincy Jones’ harebrained media gamble, to publish a hip-hop culture mag via Time Inc., the home of Fortune and Sports Illustrated, had blown up like the World Trade in 1993. The first few issues sold briskly—apparently people from all walks of life enjoyed feeling “ghetto fabulous”—and the staff’s reward was to escape the awkward elevator rides with the suits in the Time-Life skyscraper. We set up shop in our own spot on Lex, in the same building as Steve Rifkind’s Loud Records and William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review.
One rainy spring afternoon two black teenagers shrouded in baggy Gore-Tex outerwear burst through my office door unannounced, explaining that they were with the Bad Boy street team. One of them slipped off his nylon drawstring backpack and fished out two cassette tapes. “Craig Mack is the first to drop,” he said as he handed over an advance copy of Project Funk da World. “But this is the shyt right here,” he added emphatically. “You need to hear this Biggie Smalls shyt.” I placed the Craig Mack on top of a tall stack of cassettes, popped the one labeled Ready to Die into my Fisher hi-fi, and stepped into a world.
The three-and-a-half-minute intro had me hypnotized: Ominous cinematic strings give way to the sound of a heartbeat and a woman straining to give birth. “Come on, baby, push! One more time,” the father exhorts as Marvin Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up” plays in the background (on the final album, this song would be changed to Curtis Mayfield’s “Superfly,” released in 1972, the same year as Biggie’s birth). “I see the head!” the proud father roars before the music fades into the Sugar Hill Gang’s 1979 “Rapper’s Delight,” signifying that seven years have passed. Now the boy’s parents are arguing, with the father threatening to “smack the shyt outta” the mom because she “can’t control the goddamn boy” as Wonder Mike and Big Bank Hank rap on and on to the break of dawn. The sound dissolves again to Audio Two’s 1987 “Top Billin',” which marks an eight-year passage of time, and signals rap’s evolution to harder-edged sounds and themes while at the same time representing BK to the fullest. Our 15-year-old antihero is now plotting a stickup with a slightly reluctant henchman. “You momma giving you money, nikka? My moms don't give me shyt… Time to get paid… Muthafukka is you with me?” A gun is cocked, a warning shot fired, and the kids rob a whole subway car. After the screaming fades, the music shifts again, and we hear the young man being released from prison. “So how’s it feel leaving us?” the corrections officer asks sarcastically. “Ha!” Biggie replies. “What kinda fukkin’ question is that, man? I’m trying to get the fukk outta here, dog.” Defying the racist guard’s predictions, he vows, “You won’t see me in here no more. I got big plans, nikka. Big plans.”
People remember the covers, but the most prescient article VIBE ever published was Scott Poulson-Bryant’s lengthy profile of the head of A&R at Uptown Records. His name was Sean Combs, but everybody called him Puffy, and his name was buzzing even more than the artists he worked with. Scott pitched the story in that first contentious edit meeting, explaining that the hip-hop audience paid as much attention to the players behind the scenes as they did to the artists themselves. In green-lighting this audacious idea, VIBE became the first publication to recognize the fact that Puff Daddy was a star and to present him as such.
He posed in Timberlands and baggy jeans with Calvin Klein briefs showing, and talked about shaping the image of Mary J. Blige and Jodeci, about the birth of his first son, Justin Dior, and about what he called “the next generation of Bad motherfukkers.” (Puff was known to carry a briefcase containing the Bad Boy logo, a sketch of a mad-faced baby in Timbs and a diaper, so he could show it off in the club.) Then in July 1993, just as the issue was going to press with a glaring picture of Snoop Dogg on the cover, we got word that Puffy had been fired from Uptown. Scott didn’t seem the least bit fazed at the news, and smiled as we rushed to revise the conclusion of his Vanity Fair-style profile. He was plugged-in enough to know that getting fired from that job was the best thing that could ever happen to Sean Combs, and that the legend of Puffy had only just begun.
Christopher Wallace took the news of Puff getting fired a lot harder than anyone on the VIBE staff. The 21-year-old rap phenomenon, known in the streets of Brooklyn as Biggie Smalls, already knew the thrill of hearing his records blasting out of Jeeps. His verses had sparked the remixes to Mary J. Blige’s “Real Love” and Super Cat’s “Dolly My Baby,” and his first solo joint, “Party and Bullshyt,” had just dropped as a single from Uptown’s Who’s The Man? movie soundtrack. (The latter track was a favorite of Tupac Shakur’s, who played it on repeat when it first came out, and befriended the Brooklyn rapper out of sheer admiration.) That was all well and good, but Biggie wasn’t seeing any serious paper yet, and his daughter, T’Yanna, was about to be born. The crack game was the only sure payday he knew, and he had no time for anybody trying to sell him a dream. Sure, he was excited to be working on a debut album for Uptown, which he was planning to call The Teflon Don, but if Puff’s big talk about becoming a hip-hop superstar was going to fall through then Biggie had no choice but to catch the Amtrak down to North Carolina where he had set up a lucrative spot that brought in $30,000 every two weeks.
As he would later recall in his single “Juicy,” this rap shyt “was all a dream.” All those details in that song about letting his tape rock till his tape popped? True story. Biggie was a born-and-bred hip-hop head who visited his mother’s homeland of Jamaica on holidays and happened to live across the street from the New Orleans–born hornsman Donald Harrison, who exposed him to crucial jazz albums and gave him the opportunity to record his earliest raps. Creatively, Biggie Smalls was a perfect storm, drawing on the great traditions of reggae, jazz, rap, and soul. He had a booming baritone, a wicked sense of humor, and a brilliant brain crackling with buddha-blessed wordplay night and day. His rap style fused Kane’s rapid-fire polysyllables, G-Rap’s rawness, Too $hort’s bawdy boasting, and Slick Rick’s genius for spinning narratives out of dramatic dialog amongst distinct characters. But ultimately Biggie Smalls was in fact the illest because his artistry was greater than the sum total of its influences.
Biggie Smalls was in fact the illest because his artistry was greater than the sum total of its influences.
Without Puffy’s guidance he might have become the greatest hip-hop footnote ever to touch the mic. Had Puff not landed a distribution deal for his Bad Boy imprint with Clive Davis at Arista, he would never have tracked Biggie down in North Cackalacky, paging him over and over, cussing him out and telling him he had a check with his name on it. Surely then Biggie would never have headed back to New York when he did, just hours before the cops raided his spot, arresting his partner and seizing their assets. Biggie got out in the nick of time, and stepped out of the shadows into the spotlight. He had already appeared in Matty C’s “Unsigned Hype” column in The Source—that was how Puffy first heard of him—and now he was about to be profiled by Mimi Valdes in VIBE’s NEXT section, posing on Fulton Avenue in a Karl Kani sweatsuit and Timbs, still a world away from the days of Versace shades, tailored suits, and alligator boots.
Six short years after the creative pinnacle of 1988, New York hip-hop was undergoing a profound transformation. Wu-Tang Clan’s Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) arrived in December 1993, a year after Dr. Dre’s masterpiece The Chronic blew the roof off everything, dominating the streets as well as radio and video rotation like nothing seen before, and challenging New York’s long-held claim as the nerve center of hip-hop. The RZA’s seminal posse album, as raw as Dre’s album was smooth, spoke to “the core of the hard” as Da Ghetto Communicator put it in his review for The Source. Truly, 36 Chambers was the East Coast’s answer to The Chronic—positing the bold, unified vision of a single producer, populated by a gang of brilliant MCs spitting impenetrably dusted Five Percent Nation mathematics all filtered through the lens of Kung Fu movie mythology. Nas’ superb Illmatic showed another way for the East Coast to move forward—nine songs, five brilliant producers, plus the profound poetic observations of a “ghetto monk” in Q-Tip’s memorable phrase. Elsewhere in America, 1994 was the year of OutKast’s Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, Scarface’s The Diary, Common Sense’s Resurrection and Warren G’s grandiosely titled Regulate... G-Funk Era. But the Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready to Die outsold all of them.
Of course Biggie’s virtuoso flows were essential to that success, but you can’t take credit away from Puffy, who cherry-picked the best of everything that was popping at the moment—a pinch of Primo boom-bap, a smidgen of funky-worm synth, a baby-photo album cover and autobiographical narrative frame reminiscent of Illmatic, and Puff’s own specialty—songs that made people dance. He mixed all these ingredients together with perhaps the greatest mic controller ever born and proved that a New York rapper could go platinum too (even if he had to kick a little West Coast flavor to do it).
Some of Biggie's most painfully honest lyrics were tough to digest, from “Me and My bytch” to “I wouldn’t give a fukk if you're pregnant/Give me the baby rings and the No. 1 Mom pendant.” But for every “black and ugly as ever/However, I stay Coogi down to the socks,” there was a line like “stereotypes of a black male misunderstood/And it’s still all good.” Biggie’s brutal candor was its own redemption. Even the album's nihilistic title and its final, melodramatic suicide skit possessed an awful authenticity. After Ready To Die rappers could never again boast of "keeping it real" without acknowledging the dark side of the game
Released Sept. 13, 1994, Ready to Die was recorded in two bursts of creativity. Biggie’s voice sounds higher-pitched and angrier on the earlier material—tracks like “Things Done Changed” produced by Darnell Scott, and the four Easy Mo Bee joints that follow it on the album: “Gimme the Loot,” “Machine Gun Funk,” the superb “Warning” and “Ready to Die.” The later material, songs like “Juicy,” with its radio-friendly Mtume sample, and “Big Poppa” with its G-funk keyboard line, reflect Puffy’s commercial savvy as well as his powers of persuasion—Biggie was not trying to hear that shyt at first, but Puff wore him down. The Debarge-laced “One More Chance/Stay With Me” remix (which could not have been further from the original album version) sealed the deal, catapulting the Black Frank White to the highest heights. By the time it dropped, Biggie was not just a client, he was the player president.
All those promises of rap superstardom? Puff came through on everything. Biggie would appear on VIBE’s cover twice during his lifetime. First in October 1995, with his beautiful wife Faith Evans, and again in September ’96 with Puff, on the infamous “East vs West” cover. And then, three years after Biggie’s debut album dropped, he was murdered as he left a party sponsored by VIBE, six months after Tupac Shakur's murder and two months shy of Biggie's 25th birthday. He was survived by a daughter and a son and a wife and a mother and a devastated Junior Mafia clique and a gutted hip-hop nation. I myself had a hard time going to the office after he passed. The place felt haunted, or maybe it was just me. The Puffy legend would continue to grow, now inextricably intertwined with that of the late Christopher George Latore Wallace. Twenty years after Ready to Die's release, Diddy is the uncontested Big Homie of hip-hop, and Biggie’s artistry remains so pervasively influential that we cannot even see it anymore. Every major rhymesmith from Jay Z to Kendrick Lamar must wrestle with his ghost. As he put it on “Unbelievable,” my personal favorite song off his debut, “Ain’t no amateurs here, I damage and tear/MCs fear me, they too near not to hear me.” We still hear.
http://www.complex.com/music/2014/09/notorious-big-early-days-ready-to-die
By Rob Kenner
2 days ago
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Twenty years ago I was a senior editor at VIBE magazine, settling into my comfy new office with wall-to-wall green shag carpet, a sturdy wooden door, and two windows overlooking Lexington Avenue. Quincy Jones’ harebrained media gamble, to publish a hip-hop culture mag via Time Inc., the home of Fortune and Sports Illustrated, had blown up like the World Trade in 1993. The first few issues sold briskly—apparently people from all walks of life enjoyed feeling “ghetto fabulous”—and the staff’s reward was to escape the awkward elevator rides with the suits in the Time-Life skyscraper. We set up shop in our own spot on Lex, in the same building as Steve Rifkind’s Loud Records and William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review.
One rainy spring afternoon two black teenagers shrouded in baggy Gore-Tex outerwear burst through my office door unannounced, explaining that they were with the Bad Boy street team. One of them slipped off his nylon drawstring backpack and fished out two cassette tapes. “Craig Mack is the first to drop,” he said as he handed over an advance copy of Project Funk da World. “But this is the shyt right here,” he added emphatically. “You need to hear this Biggie Smalls shyt.” I placed the Craig Mack on top of a tall stack of cassettes, popped the one labeled Ready to Die into my Fisher hi-fi, and stepped into a world.
The three-and-a-half-minute intro had me hypnotized: Ominous cinematic strings give way to the sound of a heartbeat and a woman straining to give birth. “Come on, baby, push! One more time,” the father exhorts as Marvin Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up” plays in the background (on the final album, this song would be changed to Curtis Mayfield’s “Superfly,” released in 1972, the same year as Biggie’s birth). “I see the head!” the proud father roars before the music fades into the Sugar Hill Gang’s 1979 “Rapper’s Delight,” signifying that seven years have passed. Now the boy’s parents are arguing, with the father threatening to “smack the shyt outta” the mom because she “can’t control the goddamn boy” as Wonder Mike and Big Bank Hank rap on and on to the break of dawn. The sound dissolves again to Audio Two’s 1987 “Top Billin',” which marks an eight-year passage of time, and signals rap’s evolution to harder-edged sounds and themes while at the same time representing BK to the fullest. Our 15-year-old antihero is now plotting a stickup with a slightly reluctant henchman. “You momma giving you money, nikka? My moms don't give me shyt… Time to get paid… Muthafukka is you with me?” A gun is cocked, a warning shot fired, and the kids rob a whole subway car. After the screaming fades, the music shifts again, and we hear the young man being released from prison. “So how’s it feel leaving us?” the corrections officer asks sarcastically. “Ha!” Biggie replies. “What kinda fukkin’ question is that, man? I’m trying to get the fukk outta here, dog.” Defying the racist guard’s predictions, he vows, “You won’t see me in here no more. I got big plans, nikka. Big plans.”
People remember the covers, but the most prescient article VIBE ever published was Scott Poulson-Bryant’s lengthy profile of the head of A&R at Uptown Records. His name was Sean Combs, but everybody called him Puffy, and his name was buzzing even more than the artists he worked with. Scott pitched the story in that first contentious edit meeting, explaining that the hip-hop audience paid as much attention to the players behind the scenes as they did to the artists themselves. In green-lighting this audacious idea, VIBE became the first publication to recognize the fact that Puff Daddy was a star and to present him as such.
He posed in Timberlands and baggy jeans with Calvin Klein briefs showing, and talked about shaping the image of Mary J. Blige and Jodeci, about the birth of his first son, Justin Dior, and about what he called “the next generation of Bad motherfukkers.” (Puff was known to carry a briefcase containing the Bad Boy logo, a sketch of a mad-faced baby in Timbs and a diaper, so he could show it off in the club.) Then in July 1993, just as the issue was going to press with a glaring picture of Snoop Dogg on the cover, we got word that Puffy had been fired from Uptown. Scott didn’t seem the least bit fazed at the news, and smiled as we rushed to revise the conclusion of his Vanity Fair-style profile. He was plugged-in enough to know that getting fired from that job was the best thing that could ever happen to Sean Combs, and that the legend of Puffy had only just begun.
Christopher Wallace took the news of Puff getting fired a lot harder than anyone on the VIBE staff. The 21-year-old rap phenomenon, known in the streets of Brooklyn as Biggie Smalls, already knew the thrill of hearing his records blasting out of Jeeps. His verses had sparked the remixes to Mary J. Blige’s “Real Love” and Super Cat’s “Dolly My Baby,” and his first solo joint, “Party and Bullshyt,” had just dropped as a single from Uptown’s Who’s The Man? movie soundtrack. (The latter track was a favorite of Tupac Shakur’s, who played it on repeat when it first came out, and befriended the Brooklyn rapper out of sheer admiration.) That was all well and good, but Biggie wasn’t seeing any serious paper yet, and his daughter, T’Yanna, was about to be born. The crack game was the only sure payday he knew, and he had no time for anybody trying to sell him a dream. Sure, he was excited to be working on a debut album for Uptown, which he was planning to call The Teflon Don, but if Puff’s big talk about becoming a hip-hop superstar was going to fall through then Biggie had no choice but to catch the Amtrak down to North Carolina where he had set up a lucrative spot that brought in $30,000 every two weeks.
As he would later recall in his single “Juicy,” this rap shyt “was all a dream.” All those details in that song about letting his tape rock till his tape popped? True story. Biggie was a born-and-bred hip-hop head who visited his mother’s homeland of Jamaica on holidays and happened to live across the street from the New Orleans–born hornsman Donald Harrison, who exposed him to crucial jazz albums and gave him the opportunity to record his earliest raps. Creatively, Biggie Smalls was a perfect storm, drawing on the great traditions of reggae, jazz, rap, and soul. He had a booming baritone, a wicked sense of humor, and a brilliant brain crackling with buddha-blessed wordplay night and day. His rap style fused Kane’s rapid-fire polysyllables, G-Rap’s rawness, Too $hort’s bawdy boasting, and Slick Rick’s genius for spinning narratives out of dramatic dialog amongst distinct characters. But ultimately Biggie Smalls was in fact the illest because his artistry was greater than the sum total of its influences.
Biggie Smalls was in fact the illest because his artistry was greater than the sum total of its influences.
Without Puffy’s guidance he might have become the greatest hip-hop footnote ever to touch the mic. Had Puff not landed a distribution deal for his Bad Boy imprint with Clive Davis at Arista, he would never have tracked Biggie down in North Cackalacky, paging him over and over, cussing him out and telling him he had a check with his name on it. Surely then Biggie would never have headed back to New York when he did, just hours before the cops raided his spot, arresting his partner and seizing their assets. Biggie got out in the nick of time, and stepped out of the shadows into the spotlight. He had already appeared in Matty C’s “Unsigned Hype” column in The Source—that was how Puffy first heard of him—and now he was about to be profiled by Mimi Valdes in VIBE’s NEXT section, posing on Fulton Avenue in a Karl Kani sweatsuit and Timbs, still a world away from the days of Versace shades, tailored suits, and alligator boots.
Six short years after the creative pinnacle of 1988, New York hip-hop was undergoing a profound transformation. Wu-Tang Clan’s Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) arrived in December 1993, a year after Dr. Dre’s masterpiece The Chronic blew the roof off everything, dominating the streets as well as radio and video rotation like nothing seen before, and challenging New York’s long-held claim as the nerve center of hip-hop. The RZA’s seminal posse album, as raw as Dre’s album was smooth, spoke to “the core of the hard” as Da Ghetto Communicator put it in his review for The Source. Truly, 36 Chambers was the East Coast’s answer to The Chronic—positing the bold, unified vision of a single producer, populated by a gang of brilliant MCs spitting impenetrably dusted Five Percent Nation mathematics all filtered through the lens of Kung Fu movie mythology. Nas’ superb Illmatic showed another way for the East Coast to move forward—nine songs, five brilliant producers, plus the profound poetic observations of a “ghetto monk” in Q-Tip’s memorable phrase. Elsewhere in America, 1994 was the year of OutKast’s Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, Scarface’s The Diary, Common Sense’s Resurrection and Warren G’s grandiosely titled Regulate... G-Funk Era. But the Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready to Die outsold all of them.
Of course Biggie’s virtuoso flows were essential to that success, but you can’t take credit away from Puffy, who cherry-picked the best of everything that was popping at the moment—a pinch of Primo boom-bap, a smidgen of funky-worm synth, a baby-photo album cover and autobiographical narrative frame reminiscent of Illmatic, and Puff’s own specialty—songs that made people dance. He mixed all these ingredients together with perhaps the greatest mic controller ever born and proved that a New York rapper could go platinum too (even if he had to kick a little West Coast flavor to do it).
Some of Biggie's most painfully honest lyrics were tough to digest, from “Me and My bytch” to “I wouldn’t give a fukk if you're pregnant/Give me the baby rings and the No. 1 Mom pendant.” But for every “black and ugly as ever/However, I stay Coogi down to the socks,” there was a line like “stereotypes of a black male misunderstood/And it’s still all good.” Biggie’s brutal candor was its own redemption. Even the album's nihilistic title and its final, melodramatic suicide skit possessed an awful authenticity. After Ready To Die rappers could never again boast of "keeping it real" without acknowledging the dark side of the game
Released Sept. 13, 1994, Ready to Die was recorded in two bursts of creativity. Biggie’s voice sounds higher-pitched and angrier on the earlier material—tracks like “Things Done Changed” produced by Darnell Scott, and the four Easy Mo Bee joints that follow it on the album: “Gimme the Loot,” “Machine Gun Funk,” the superb “Warning” and “Ready to Die.” The later material, songs like “Juicy,” with its radio-friendly Mtume sample, and “Big Poppa” with its G-funk keyboard line, reflect Puffy’s commercial savvy as well as his powers of persuasion—Biggie was not trying to hear that shyt at first, but Puff wore him down. The Debarge-laced “One More Chance/Stay With Me” remix (which could not have been further from the original album version) sealed the deal, catapulting the Black Frank White to the highest heights. By the time it dropped, Biggie was not just a client, he was the player president.
All those promises of rap superstardom? Puff came through on everything. Biggie would appear on VIBE’s cover twice during his lifetime. First in October 1995, with his beautiful wife Faith Evans, and again in September ’96 with Puff, on the infamous “East vs West” cover. And then, three years after Biggie’s debut album dropped, he was murdered as he left a party sponsored by VIBE, six months after Tupac Shakur's murder and two months shy of Biggie's 25th birthday. He was survived by a daughter and a son and a wife and a mother and a devastated Junior Mafia clique and a gutted hip-hop nation. I myself had a hard time going to the office after he passed. The place felt haunted, or maybe it was just me. The Puffy legend would continue to grow, now inextricably intertwined with that of the late Christopher George Latore Wallace. Twenty years after Ready to Die's release, Diddy is the uncontested Big Homie of hip-hop, and Biggie’s artistry remains so pervasively influential that we cannot even see it anymore. Every major rhymesmith from Jay Z to Kendrick Lamar must wrestle with his ghost. As he put it on “Unbelievable,” my personal favorite song off his debut, “Ain’t no amateurs here, I damage and tear/MCs fear me, they too near not to hear me.” We still hear.
http://www.complex.com/music/2014/09/notorious-big-early-days-ready-to-die
The Beatles. Bob Dylan. Biggie Smalls.
410
57
135
Why the rapper belongs in the company of pop’s most influential artists.
By Jack Hamilton
The Notorious B.I.G., the greatest rapper who ever lived.
Photo illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker. Photo by Catherine McGann/Getty Images.
A lot of great art ends with suicide—Anna Karenina, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Thelma & Louise—but it takes particular audacity to end with a suicide note. “Suicidal Thoughts,” the closing track of the Notorious B.I.G.’s towering debut album, Ready to Die, is two minutes of rhymed confession that culminates in a self-inflicted gunshot. Coming at the end of an album obsessed with death and all varieties of moral transgression, the opening lines—“when I die, fukk it I wanna go to hell / cause I’m a piece of shyt it ain’t hard to fukkin’ tell”—seem to herald the most depressing piece of music in human history. But soon we have dark humor (“it don’t make sense going to heaven with the goodie-goodies / Dressed in white, I like black Timbs, and black hoodies”), deathbed sexual boasting (“My baby momma kissed me but she’s glad I’m gone / She knows me and her sister had something going on”), and cultish, kitschy references to New Jack Cityand Beat Street. It’s sad, funny, bleak, brilliant, and then it’s over, and all that’s left is to play the whole thing again.
Ready to Die turns 20 on Saturday, and even at a moment when hip-hop is particularly taken with such milestones, this is (fittingly) an enormous one. Ready to Die is not the greatest rap album ever made, and probably isn’t even the greatest rap album made in 1994—it sags at times with superfluous skits, some of its production touches have aged awkwardly (congrats to that whistling synth hook on “Big Poppa” for owing 20 years’ worth of royalties to The Chronic), and Sean Combs’ somnambulant hype-man routine only grows more irritating with time.
But it is quite possibly the most important, if only for the reason that its maker transformed the music like no rapper before or since. Biggie Smalls didn’t alter the hip-hop landscape so much as crater it, leaving behind an unfillable void and an unhealable wound.The Notorious B.I.G. is the greatest rapper who ever lived in the same way that Michael Jordan is the greatest basketball player who ever lived: Some people may argue but they are usually Luddite classicists, incorrigible homers, or hipster contrarians. Seventeen years after his murder at the age of 24, he is of a piece with Miles, Dylan, the Beatles, Aretha, artists whose influence is so immense it ascends into a sort of fundamental sonic iconography, the never-ending soundtrack to everything. A world without KRS-One or Ice Cube or Jay Z would be unimaginably impoverished, but a world without Biggie Smalls is simply unimaginable.
It’s all there: the menace, the mischief, the mythmaking, the perfect convergences of music and language.
Christopher Wallace was born in Brooklyn on May 21, 1972, son of Voletta Wallace and George Letore, the latter of whom his son would barely know. Both parents were Jamaican immigrants. “Big Chris” grew up on St. James Place in the neighborhood (once) known as Bedford-Stuyvesant, and began selling drugs as an adolescent. After serving a nine-month prison stint at seventeen he redoubled his commitment to music, taking the name “Biggie Smalls,” after a character in the 1975 Sidney Poitier and Bill Cosby film Let’s Do It Again.(An ownership claim would soon force him to go by “Notorious B.I.G.” professionally.)
He made a demo with local DJ Hit Man 50 Grand that caught the ear of tastemaker Mister Cee, who in turn thrust it into the hands of Matteo Capoluongo (aka Matty C) curator of the Source magazine’s influential “Unsigned Hype” feature. In March 1992 Chris Wallace’s scowling 19-year-old visage peered out from the esteemed monthly’s pages. “Straight outta Brooklyn, New York, the heavy-set brother B-I-G has mad skills,” the column noted. “His rhymes are fatter than he is.”
The write-up grabbed the attention of an aspiring impresario named Sean “Puffy” Combs, and in spring of 1993 a solo track called “Party and Bullshyt” was released on the soundtrack to the Dr. Dré (the other one) and Ed Lover vehicle Who’s the Man? The movie was quickly forgotten, but “Party and Bullshyt”—initially credited simply to “BIG”—became a sensation. The song’s hook was a reworking of the Last Poets’ 1970 classic “When the Revolution Comes,” a fiery prophecy of urban revolt, which closed: “But until then you know and I know that ******s will party and bullshyt and party and bullshyt and party and bullshyt … some might even die before the revolution comes.” Biggie snatched the phrase and iconoclastically flipped it into a club banger, the opiate becoming the end in itself—altered consciousness might be false consciousness, but it’s also the most fun consciousness. “I was a terror since the public school era / Bathroom passes, cutting classes, squeezing asses,” his voice booms in the song’s opening lines, and it’s all already there—the menace, the mischief, the mythmaking, the perfect convergences of music and language (“terror” and “era” rhyme perfectly in his Bed-Stuy patois).
By the time Ready to Die dropped on Sept. 13, 1994, the buzz surrounding the album and its maker was deafening; with his Brooklyn pedigree and growing stable of true-school endorsers, B.I.G. appeared the ordained successor to rap’s illustrious line of kings of New York. Early notices were glowing: The Source dubbed the album, with characteristic panache, an “illiotic bomb,” declaring that “each song is like another scene in his Lifestyles of the Black and Shameless, the Tec and stainless.” Even the famously rap-illiterate Rolling Stone gave it four stars.
As landmark debuts go, Ready to Die didn’t actually do a whole lot that was new. Critics praised the disturbed ambivalence with which Biggie recounted his own street hustling, but the Geto Boys’ “Mind Playing Tricks On Me” had covered the same terrain several years earlier. The storytelling was viscerally wrought and lavishly detailed, but no more so than Ice Cube’s “It Was a Good Day,” or even Slick Rick and Doug E. Fresh’s 1985 classic “La Di Da Di.” Even B.I.G.’s full-figured Casanova act, showcased on what would become the album’s biggest chart hit, “Big Poppa,” wasn’t particularly groundbreaking—Heavy D had recently worked the same shtick to great effect for Uptown Records, under the watchful gaze of Sean Combs himself.
“Juicy” is one of the best hip-hop tracks ever made, and maybe the greatest rags-to-riches fable in all of American music.
But Ready to Die did everything bigger, and in almost every instance better. (Nothing is better than “Mind Playing Tricks On Me.”) Like his crosstown contemporary Nas, Biggie hailed from a generation raised on rap music to a degree that previous generations hadn’t been. Christopher Wallace had grown up with Run-DMC and Big Daddy Kane and Rakim, but he’d also grown up with oddball flotsam like Breakin’ 2, Disorderlies, and Kwamé, the polka-dot king. An earlier generation had come up in the period of hip-hop subculture, but Biggie’s generation came up in the period of hip-hop popular culture, an important distinction. He had total fluency within the genre and an ironic irreverence toward its past; he was aware of rap tradition while carrying himself as its culmination. “You never thought that hip-hop would take it this far,” he famously proclaimed, and there was no doubt to whom “this” referred.
When Ready to Die became a platinum-selling sensation, the hottest MC in New York was suddenly one of the biggest pop stars in the world. As blockbusters go, Ready to Die was a shockingly intimate album, and one of its most innovative aspects was its unique brand of roughneck sentimentality. The music often felt obsessively confessional, though always rendered with a dramatist’s flair. “Things Done Changed” and “Me & My bytch” stood out as melancholic laments over bygone happiness, while “Respect” went so far as to open with a first-person retelling of the rapper’s own birth: “Umbilical cord’s wrapped around my neck / I’m seeing my death and I ain’t even took my first step.”
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Why the rapper belongs in the company of pop’s most influential artists.
By Jack Hamilton
The Notorious B.I.G., the greatest rapper who ever lived.
Photo illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker. Photo by Catherine McGann/Getty Images.
A lot of great art ends with suicide—Anna Karenina, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Thelma & Louise—but it takes particular audacity to end with a suicide note. “Suicidal Thoughts,” the closing track of the Notorious B.I.G.’s towering debut album, Ready to Die, is two minutes of rhymed confession that culminates in a self-inflicted gunshot. Coming at the end of an album obsessed with death and all varieties of moral transgression, the opening lines—“when I die, fukk it I wanna go to hell / cause I’m a piece of shyt it ain’t hard to fukkin’ tell”—seem to herald the most depressing piece of music in human history. But soon we have dark humor (“it don’t make sense going to heaven with the goodie-goodies / Dressed in white, I like black Timbs, and black hoodies”), deathbed sexual boasting (“My baby momma kissed me but she’s glad I’m gone / She knows me and her sister had something going on”), and cultish, kitschy references to New Jack Cityand Beat Street. It’s sad, funny, bleak, brilliant, and then it’s over, and all that’s left is to play the whole thing again.
Ready to Die turns 20 on Saturday, and even at a moment when hip-hop is particularly taken with such milestones, this is (fittingly) an enormous one. Ready to Die is not the greatest rap album ever made, and probably isn’t even the greatest rap album made in 1994—it sags at times with superfluous skits, some of its production touches have aged awkwardly (congrats to that whistling synth hook on “Big Poppa” for owing 20 years’ worth of royalties to The Chronic), and Sean Combs’ somnambulant hype-man routine only grows more irritating with time.
But it is quite possibly the most important, if only for the reason that its maker transformed the music like no rapper before or since. Biggie Smalls didn’t alter the hip-hop landscape so much as crater it, leaving behind an unfillable void and an unhealable wound.The Notorious B.I.G. is the greatest rapper who ever lived in the same way that Michael Jordan is the greatest basketball player who ever lived: Some people may argue but they are usually Luddite classicists, incorrigible homers, or hipster contrarians. Seventeen years after his murder at the age of 24, he is of a piece with Miles, Dylan, the Beatles, Aretha, artists whose influence is so immense it ascends into a sort of fundamental sonic iconography, the never-ending soundtrack to everything. A world without KRS-One or Ice Cube or Jay Z would be unimaginably impoverished, but a world without Biggie Smalls is simply unimaginable.
It’s all there: the menace, the mischief, the mythmaking, the perfect convergences of music and language.
Christopher Wallace was born in Brooklyn on May 21, 1972, son of Voletta Wallace and George Letore, the latter of whom his son would barely know. Both parents were Jamaican immigrants. “Big Chris” grew up on St. James Place in the neighborhood (once) known as Bedford-Stuyvesant, and began selling drugs as an adolescent. After serving a nine-month prison stint at seventeen he redoubled his commitment to music, taking the name “Biggie Smalls,” after a character in the 1975 Sidney Poitier and Bill Cosby film Let’s Do It Again.(An ownership claim would soon force him to go by “Notorious B.I.G.” professionally.)
He made a demo with local DJ Hit Man 50 Grand that caught the ear of tastemaker Mister Cee, who in turn thrust it into the hands of Matteo Capoluongo (aka Matty C) curator of the Source magazine’s influential “Unsigned Hype” feature. In March 1992 Chris Wallace’s scowling 19-year-old visage peered out from the esteemed monthly’s pages. “Straight outta Brooklyn, New York, the heavy-set brother B-I-G has mad skills,” the column noted. “His rhymes are fatter than he is.”
The write-up grabbed the attention of an aspiring impresario named Sean “Puffy” Combs, and in spring of 1993 a solo track called “Party and Bullshyt” was released on the soundtrack to the Dr. Dré (the other one) and Ed Lover vehicle Who’s the Man? The movie was quickly forgotten, but “Party and Bullshyt”—initially credited simply to “BIG”—became a sensation. The song’s hook was a reworking of the Last Poets’ 1970 classic “When the Revolution Comes,” a fiery prophecy of urban revolt, which closed: “But until then you know and I know that ******s will party and bullshyt and party and bullshyt and party and bullshyt … some might even die before the revolution comes.” Biggie snatched the phrase and iconoclastically flipped it into a club banger, the opiate becoming the end in itself—altered consciousness might be false consciousness, but it’s also the most fun consciousness. “I was a terror since the public school era / Bathroom passes, cutting classes, squeezing asses,” his voice booms in the song’s opening lines, and it’s all already there—the menace, the mischief, the mythmaking, the perfect convergences of music and language (“terror” and “era” rhyme perfectly in his Bed-Stuy patois).
By the time Ready to Die dropped on Sept. 13, 1994, the buzz surrounding the album and its maker was deafening; with his Brooklyn pedigree and growing stable of true-school endorsers, B.I.G. appeared the ordained successor to rap’s illustrious line of kings of New York. Early notices were glowing: The Source dubbed the album, with characteristic panache, an “illiotic bomb,” declaring that “each song is like another scene in his Lifestyles of the Black and Shameless, the Tec and stainless.” Even the famously rap-illiterate Rolling Stone gave it four stars.
As landmark debuts go, Ready to Die didn’t actually do a whole lot that was new. Critics praised the disturbed ambivalence with which Biggie recounted his own street hustling, but the Geto Boys’ “Mind Playing Tricks On Me” had covered the same terrain several years earlier. The storytelling was viscerally wrought and lavishly detailed, but no more so than Ice Cube’s “It Was a Good Day,” or even Slick Rick and Doug E. Fresh’s 1985 classic “La Di Da Di.” Even B.I.G.’s full-figured Casanova act, showcased on what would become the album’s biggest chart hit, “Big Poppa,” wasn’t particularly groundbreaking—Heavy D had recently worked the same shtick to great effect for Uptown Records, under the watchful gaze of Sean Combs himself.
“Juicy” is one of the best hip-hop tracks ever made, and maybe the greatest rags-to-riches fable in all of American music.
But Ready to Die did everything bigger, and in almost every instance better. (Nothing is better than “Mind Playing Tricks On Me.”) Like his crosstown contemporary Nas, Biggie hailed from a generation raised on rap music to a degree that previous generations hadn’t been. Christopher Wallace had grown up with Run-DMC and Big Daddy Kane and Rakim, but he’d also grown up with oddball flotsam like Breakin’ 2, Disorderlies, and Kwamé, the polka-dot king. An earlier generation had come up in the period of hip-hop subculture, but Biggie’s generation came up in the period of hip-hop popular culture, an important distinction. He had total fluency within the genre and an ironic irreverence toward its past; he was aware of rap tradition while carrying himself as its culmination. “You never thought that hip-hop would take it this far,” he famously proclaimed, and there was no doubt to whom “this” referred.
When Ready to Die became a platinum-selling sensation, the hottest MC in New York was suddenly one of the biggest pop stars in the world. As blockbusters go, Ready to Die was a shockingly intimate album, and one of its most innovative aspects was its unique brand of roughneck sentimentality. The music often felt obsessively confessional, though always rendered with a dramatist’s flair. “Things Done Changed” and “Me & My bytch” stood out as melancholic laments over bygone happiness, while “Respect” went so far as to open with a first-person retelling of the rapper’s own birth: “Umbilical cord’s wrapped around my neck / I’m seeing my death and I ain’t even took my first step.”
The Beatles. Bob Dylan. Biggie Smalls.
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Why the rapper belongs in the company of pop’s most influential artists.
By Jack Hamilton
(Continued from Page 1)
Even in its darkest moments—perhaps especially in its darkest moments—Ready to Die was located squarely at the intersection of personal history and personal mythmaking. Smalls’ rhymes were frequently praised for their documentary realism—“his lyrics mix autobiographical details about crime and violence with emotional honesty,” noted the New York Times in late 1994—but like most great pop music Ready to Die was primarily a work of imagination. Nowhere was this more apparent than “Juicy,” Ready to Die’s first single and its most beloved track. One fact about “Juicy” is that it is not, in any strict sense, true. While young Chris Wallace had hardly grown up in privilege, he’d been raised in a spacious three-bedroom apartment by his hard-working and accomplished mother, who by all accounts (including her own) had spoiled her son rotten—toys, video games, junk food—in her attempts to keep him away from the street-corner drug game that pocked their Bed-Stuy neighborhood. He never ate sardines for dinner in a “one-room shack,” and birthdays were certainly not the worst days.
A much more important fact about “Juicy” is that it is one of the best hip-hop tracks ever made, and maybe the greatest rags-to-riches fable in all of American music. Based around a brilliant sample of Mtume’s 1983 R&B hit “Juicy Fruit,” the song was the perfect showcase for B.I.G.’s artistry and intellect, his NYC bona fides, his monumental star power and pop charisma. For a song about how hard life once was, the track is awash in warm and lovingly referential nostalgia. The more iconic shout-outs still land—Salt-N-Pepa, Funkmaster Flex, DJ Marley Marl—but just as compelling are the moments of connoisseurship and quirky ephemera: Mr. Magic’s “Rap Attack” radio show, the World Famous Brucie B, Word Up! magazine, Shawn Brown’s colossally weird novelty track “Rappin’ Duke” (duh-ha, duh-ha).
Never has a death threat sounded so playfully mellifluous.
Ready to Die was a tour de force of technique and creativity that by its end had made, and unmade, one of the most vivid characters in American popular art: the Notorious B.I.G. himself.That character was a work of staggering dimensions, physically and psychologically, a cold-blooded sociopath one minute and a brooding introvert the next, a swaggering ladykiller blessed with impossible sexual prowess, then a tragic depressive overcome by his own vulnerabilities. He drew from his own past but also from the pulp mythologies of Blaxploitation and B-list crime noirs (most notably Abel Ferrara’s King of New York), offering himself up as a pitch-dark satirization of early 1990s panics over the “superpredator.”
He was terrifying, hilarious, angry, depraved, smart as hell, harrowingly bleak, and shockingly profane. “Damn, what happened to the summertime cookouts? / Every time I turn around a nikka gettin’ took out,” he’d lament, then brag on the next track that “I’ve been robbin’ motherfukkers since the slave ships,” a line so tasteless it provokes only awe. But above of all he was likeable, incredibly so. This was the bedrock miracle of Ready to Die, how a concept album about moral nihilism and existential ambivalence somehow became a multiplatinum smash, how choruses like “fukk the world / don’t ask me for shyt” came to sound as infectious as “we are the world / we are the children.” He wanted to rob you (or worse), and you almost wanted to let him, because he was the best rapper you’d ever heard in your life. The magnetism and the virtuosity were inseparable, the immense gifts of music and language paired with wit and ferocious intelligence. Take the opening to the third verse of “Everyday Struggle”: “I’m seeing body after body and our Mayor Giuliani / ain’t tryin’ to see no black man turn to John Gotti,” a line that’s disturbing and funny and ripped-from-the-headlines-current and sounds completely amazing, its soft vowels and hard consonants popping off the tongue like fireworks, or gunshots. Or, “there’s gonna be a lot of slow singin’, and flower-bringin’ / if my burglar alarm starts ringin’,” from “Warning”—never has a death threat sounded so playfully mellifluous.
Rap is sometimes described as poetry, but it’s not—it’s music. There is poetry in rap the same way that there’s poetry in folk or R&B or opera, but it exists first and foremost as sound. I can write “Buck shots out the sun roof of Lexus coupes / Leave no witnesses, what you think this is?” and it looks cool enough on the page, but it can’t convey the percussive way “buck shots” mimics the thing it’s describing, or how when rapped in a thick and husky voice that sounds like Kool G Rap meets Marlon Brando, “roof” and “coupes” sound unexpectedly beautiful together, or how “witnesses” and “think this is” rhyme perfectly even though they shouldn’t. These are the sounds of someone who heard the world differently than everyone else and who made music that bent our ears to his own—or, more simply, a musical genius. Years after the release of Ready to Die, Combs recalled how difficult it was at first to get his prized talent to even arrange his work in song form: “At first B.I.G. would write these long rhymes, like ten minutes long, with no structure, no chorus—just him destroying the microphone and leaving it smoking.”
1995 would belong to Biggie Smalls. “Big Poppa” and the DeBarge-sampling remix of “One More Chance” were radio smashes, and B.I.G. also oversaw Junior M.A.F.I.A.’s Conspiracy LP and took guest turns on its two biggest hits, “Get Money” and “Player’s Anthem,” the latter of which boasts arguably the best verse he ever recorded. He was on MTV, magazine covers, Martin. And then there was the growing rivalry with Tupac Shakur and Suge Knight’s Death Row Records, which played out in interviews, on award-show stages, and of course on record, most notably “Who Shot Ya?” the menacing masterpiece that first appeared as the B-side to “Big Poppa.” The circumstances of both Shakur’s and Biggie’s murders were horrifying at the time, and when bullets ripped through B.I.G.’s GMC Suburban on the early morning of March 9, 1997, it felt like the awful culmination of some slow-motion cataclysm. In retrospect the whole ordeal becomes all the more incomprehensible, a prolonged moment of insanity and a worst-case scenario of young men in over their heads. It will haunt the people who survived it for the rest of their lives, and likely haunt hip-hop for even longer.
Whatever forces conspired to snatch the life of an absurdly talented 24-year-old, his art form was most certainly not among them.
Since his murder it’s become easy to hear Ready to Die as both a beginning and the beginning of the end. It’s an impression the album’s title certainly doesn’t dissuade (Biggie himself wanted to call it The Teflon Don), and there’s little question Biggie was obsessed with death and terrified by its prospect—shortly after the release of Ready to Die, he told an interviewer that he was already “scared of getting my brains blown out.” And all too predictably, in the wake of his murder his entire artistic life became reconsidered in light of his imagined trespasses. People who’d always hated rap waved bloody shirts and congratulated themselves for hating rap, and the typical hand-wringing abounded. “Rapping, Living and Dying a Gangsta Life,” one headline declared; “Which Came First, the Rapper or the Gangsta?” asked another. “The Short Life of a Rap Star, Shadowed by Many Troubles,” wrote the New York Times in a posthumous appraisal, in language eerily and sickeningly reminiscent of its controversial profile of another murdered young black man, Michael Brown, published just a few weeks ago.
The tragedy of death occasioned a referendum of the supposed pathologies of life. Christopher Wallace may have been, in the well-worn words of Nina Simone, young, gifted and black, but to many he was just a rapper, or a gangsta, if they could even distinguish between the two. Whatever forces conspired to snatch the life of an absurdly talented 24-year-old, his art form was most certainly not among them, even if few were inclined to look much further—to this day, his murder remains unsolved.
In death he became immortal. His double-album follow-up to Ready to Die was released two weeks after his murder: titled Life After Death in a morbid coincidence, it sold more than 10 million copies and begat a pair of No. 1 hits, “Hypnotize” and “Mo Money Mo Problems.” “I’ll Be Missing You,” a tribute single by Puffy and B.I.G.’s widow, Faith Evans, was released in May and spent 11 weeks on top of the Billboard Hot 100 despite being one of the worst songs ever written. Memorial shout-outs on records were so common, they began to feel like a verbal tic. By 1998 Talib Kweli was reminiscing about “when Pac and Biggie was still cool / before they was martyrs.” In 2001 Jay Z declared, “if I ain’t better than Big, I’m the closest one,” and the mere act of mentioning himself in the same sentence was gasp-inducing. For 17 years Biggie Smalls has been both ever-absent and ever-present, the singular touchstone of his genre. Genuflection is no longer even necessary, it’s just implicitly understood.
And the music endures, everywhere. In 2014 countless teenagers know every word to “Juicy,” which means that in 2014 countless teenagers at least kind of sort of know who Lovebug Starski is. If you’re under the age of 45, you probably can’t hear Diana Ross’s “I’m Coming Out” without mumbling “federal agents mad cause I’m flagrant” under your breath. The instrumental of “Who Shot Ya?” gets pumped into Nets games at the Barclays Center that stands less than a mile from Biggie’s childhood home, like some amiable and innocuous jingle for 21st-century Brooklyn. Twenty years after Ready to Die, Christopher Wallace is still the biggest star in rap, still everything he always told us he would be.
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/...he_notorious_b_i_g_s_debut_we_re_still.2.html
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Why the rapper belongs in the company of pop’s most influential artists.
By Jack Hamilton
(Continued from Page 1)
Even in its darkest moments—perhaps especially in its darkest moments—Ready to Die was located squarely at the intersection of personal history and personal mythmaking. Smalls’ rhymes were frequently praised for their documentary realism—“his lyrics mix autobiographical details about crime and violence with emotional honesty,” noted the New York Times in late 1994—but like most great pop music Ready to Die was primarily a work of imagination. Nowhere was this more apparent than “Juicy,” Ready to Die’s first single and its most beloved track. One fact about “Juicy” is that it is not, in any strict sense, true. While young Chris Wallace had hardly grown up in privilege, he’d been raised in a spacious three-bedroom apartment by his hard-working and accomplished mother, who by all accounts (including her own) had spoiled her son rotten—toys, video games, junk food—in her attempts to keep him away from the street-corner drug game that pocked their Bed-Stuy neighborhood. He never ate sardines for dinner in a “one-room shack,” and birthdays were certainly not the worst days.
A much more important fact about “Juicy” is that it is one of the best hip-hop tracks ever made, and maybe the greatest rags-to-riches fable in all of American music. Based around a brilliant sample of Mtume’s 1983 R&B hit “Juicy Fruit,” the song was the perfect showcase for B.I.G.’s artistry and intellect, his NYC bona fides, his monumental star power and pop charisma. For a song about how hard life once was, the track is awash in warm and lovingly referential nostalgia. The more iconic shout-outs still land—Salt-N-Pepa, Funkmaster Flex, DJ Marley Marl—but just as compelling are the moments of connoisseurship and quirky ephemera: Mr. Magic’s “Rap Attack” radio show, the World Famous Brucie B, Word Up! magazine, Shawn Brown’s colossally weird novelty track “Rappin’ Duke” (duh-ha, duh-ha).
Never has a death threat sounded so playfully mellifluous.
Ready to Die was a tour de force of technique and creativity that by its end had made, and unmade, one of the most vivid characters in American popular art: the Notorious B.I.G. himself.That character was a work of staggering dimensions, physically and psychologically, a cold-blooded sociopath one minute and a brooding introvert the next, a swaggering ladykiller blessed with impossible sexual prowess, then a tragic depressive overcome by his own vulnerabilities. He drew from his own past but also from the pulp mythologies of Blaxploitation and B-list crime noirs (most notably Abel Ferrara’s King of New York), offering himself up as a pitch-dark satirization of early 1990s panics over the “superpredator.”
He was terrifying, hilarious, angry, depraved, smart as hell, harrowingly bleak, and shockingly profane. “Damn, what happened to the summertime cookouts? / Every time I turn around a nikka gettin’ took out,” he’d lament, then brag on the next track that “I’ve been robbin’ motherfukkers since the slave ships,” a line so tasteless it provokes only awe. But above of all he was likeable, incredibly so. This was the bedrock miracle of Ready to Die, how a concept album about moral nihilism and existential ambivalence somehow became a multiplatinum smash, how choruses like “fukk the world / don’t ask me for shyt” came to sound as infectious as “we are the world / we are the children.” He wanted to rob you (or worse), and you almost wanted to let him, because he was the best rapper you’d ever heard in your life. The magnetism and the virtuosity were inseparable, the immense gifts of music and language paired with wit and ferocious intelligence. Take the opening to the third verse of “Everyday Struggle”: “I’m seeing body after body and our Mayor Giuliani / ain’t tryin’ to see no black man turn to John Gotti,” a line that’s disturbing and funny and ripped-from-the-headlines-current and sounds completely amazing, its soft vowels and hard consonants popping off the tongue like fireworks, or gunshots. Or, “there’s gonna be a lot of slow singin’, and flower-bringin’ / if my burglar alarm starts ringin’,” from “Warning”—never has a death threat sounded so playfully mellifluous.
Rap is sometimes described as poetry, but it’s not—it’s music. There is poetry in rap the same way that there’s poetry in folk or R&B or opera, but it exists first and foremost as sound. I can write “Buck shots out the sun roof of Lexus coupes / Leave no witnesses, what you think this is?” and it looks cool enough on the page, but it can’t convey the percussive way “buck shots” mimics the thing it’s describing, or how when rapped in a thick and husky voice that sounds like Kool G Rap meets Marlon Brando, “roof” and “coupes” sound unexpectedly beautiful together, or how “witnesses” and “think this is” rhyme perfectly even though they shouldn’t. These are the sounds of someone who heard the world differently than everyone else and who made music that bent our ears to his own—or, more simply, a musical genius. Years after the release of Ready to Die, Combs recalled how difficult it was at first to get his prized talent to even arrange his work in song form: “At first B.I.G. would write these long rhymes, like ten minutes long, with no structure, no chorus—just him destroying the microphone and leaving it smoking.”
1995 would belong to Biggie Smalls. “Big Poppa” and the DeBarge-sampling remix of “One More Chance” were radio smashes, and B.I.G. also oversaw Junior M.A.F.I.A.’s Conspiracy LP and took guest turns on its two biggest hits, “Get Money” and “Player’s Anthem,” the latter of which boasts arguably the best verse he ever recorded. He was on MTV, magazine covers, Martin. And then there was the growing rivalry with Tupac Shakur and Suge Knight’s Death Row Records, which played out in interviews, on award-show stages, and of course on record, most notably “Who Shot Ya?” the menacing masterpiece that first appeared as the B-side to “Big Poppa.” The circumstances of both Shakur’s and Biggie’s murders were horrifying at the time, and when bullets ripped through B.I.G.’s GMC Suburban on the early morning of March 9, 1997, it felt like the awful culmination of some slow-motion cataclysm. In retrospect the whole ordeal becomes all the more incomprehensible, a prolonged moment of insanity and a worst-case scenario of young men in over their heads. It will haunt the people who survived it for the rest of their lives, and likely haunt hip-hop for even longer.
Whatever forces conspired to snatch the life of an absurdly talented 24-year-old, his art form was most certainly not among them.
Since his murder it’s become easy to hear Ready to Die as both a beginning and the beginning of the end. It’s an impression the album’s title certainly doesn’t dissuade (Biggie himself wanted to call it The Teflon Don), and there’s little question Biggie was obsessed with death and terrified by its prospect—shortly after the release of Ready to Die, he told an interviewer that he was already “scared of getting my brains blown out.” And all too predictably, in the wake of his murder his entire artistic life became reconsidered in light of his imagined trespasses. People who’d always hated rap waved bloody shirts and congratulated themselves for hating rap, and the typical hand-wringing abounded. “Rapping, Living and Dying a Gangsta Life,” one headline declared; “Which Came First, the Rapper or the Gangsta?” asked another. “The Short Life of a Rap Star, Shadowed by Many Troubles,” wrote the New York Times in a posthumous appraisal, in language eerily and sickeningly reminiscent of its controversial profile of another murdered young black man, Michael Brown, published just a few weeks ago.
The tragedy of death occasioned a referendum of the supposed pathologies of life. Christopher Wallace may have been, in the well-worn words of Nina Simone, young, gifted and black, but to many he was just a rapper, or a gangsta, if they could even distinguish between the two. Whatever forces conspired to snatch the life of an absurdly talented 24-year-old, his art form was most certainly not among them, even if few were inclined to look much further—to this day, his murder remains unsolved.
In death he became immortal. His double-album follow-up to Ready to Die was released two weeks after his murder: titled Life After Death in a morbid coincidence, it sold more than 10 million copies and begat a pair of No. 1 hits, “Hypnotize” and “Mo Money Mo Problems.” “I’ll Be Missing You,” a tribute single by Puffy and B.I.G.’s widow, Faith Evans, was released in May and spent 11 weeks on top of the Billboard Hot 100 despite being one of the worst songs ever written. Memorial shout-outs on records were so common, they began to feel like a verbal tic. By 1998 Talib Kweli was reminiscing about “when Pac and Biggie was still cool / before they was martyrs.” In 2001 Jay Z declared, “if I ain’t better than Big, I’m the closest one,” and the mere act of mentioning himself in the same sentence was gasp-inducing. For 17 years Biggie Smalls has been both ever-absent and ever-present, the singular touchstone of his genre. Genuflection is no longer even necessary, it’s just implicitly understood.
And the music endures, everywhere. In 2014 countless teenagers know every word to “Juicy,” which means that in 2014 countless teenagers at least kind of sort of know who Lovebug Starski is. If you’re under the age of 45, you probably can’t hear Diana Ross’s “I’m Coming Out” without mumbling “federal agents mad cause I’m flagrant” under your breath. The instrumental of “Who Shot Ya?” gets pumped into Nets games at the Barclays Center that stands less than a mile from Biggie’s childhood home, like some amiable and innocuous jingle for 21st-century Brooklyn. Twenty years after Ready to Die, Christopher Wallace is still the biggest star in rap, still everything he always told us he would be.
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/...he_notorious_b_i_g_s_debut_we_re_still.2.html
ManBearPig
half man half bearpig
I remember my dad buying me this album when I was 7 years old