FEATURE:
Juicy
The Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready to Die at Thirty
_________
ON 13th September…
we will mark thirty years of The Notorious B.I.G.’s debut album, Ready to Die. Its title is quite chilling, The Rap prodigy was killed less than three years after its release. He died at the age of twenty-four. I want to spend some time with one of the greatest debut albums of the 1990s. An artist who burned briefly but helped change the course of Hip-Hop history. Ready to Die was recorded from 1993 to 1994 at The Hit Factory and D&D Studios in New York City. This groundbreaking debut album, a loose semi-autobiographical concept, tells of the rapper's experiences as a young criminal. We lost The Notorious B.I.G. days before Life After Death in 1997. I want to bring in a few features about this incredible album. One of the very best of all time. The first of three features is Stereogum. They highlighted and dissected Ready to Die on its twentieth anniversary in 2014:
“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 fucking 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 fuck. He had gravity.
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: “Fuck 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 fuckin’ 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 shit, 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.)
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 motherfucker 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”.
In terms of accolades, Ready to Die has been heralded as a classic by so many sources and sites. One of the greatest Hardcore Rap albums of all time, this sensational debut reinvented East Coast Rap. For those who have not heard Ready to Die, its thirtieth anniversary is a perfect opportunity. It still sounds like nothing else! A truly original and mesmeric work of supreme confidence and invention from The Notorious B.I.G. Earlier this year, Rolling Stone ranked Ready to Die twenty-second in their list of the 500 best albums ever:
“Ready To Die’ is the debut record of The Notorious B.I.G., and the only one to be released within his lifetime. Biggie Smalls was signed by Sean “Puffy” Combs to Uptown Records after the latter heard his demo tape. Biggie would subsequently start recording the album in 1993 but when Combs was fired from the label, Biggie’s future was left in the balance. Combs would ultimately start Bad Boy Records, to which Biggie would be signed, but in the interim he made ends meet by selling drugs. By the time the recording was finish, Biggie was 22-years-old.
The record opens with the narrative of a woman giving birth. As the baby comes we hear the song ‘Pusherman’ by Curtis Mayfield playing. Brilliant subtlety as that single was released in 1972, the same year that Smalls aka Christopher Wallace was born. This gives an indication that the record is somewhat autobiographical. That song is about a drug dealer, foreshadowing Wallace’s brief stint later on. The track then cycles through ‘80s and early ‘90s Hip hop songs, ‘Rapper’s Delight,’ ‘Top Billin’ and ‘Tha Shiznit,’ a clever device to illustrate the passage of time. It ends with Biggie being released from jail, mirroring his real life as he was arrested in 1990 for dealing crack. Lead single starts off the lyrics, “Yeah, this album is dedicated/To all the teachers that told me I'd never amount to nothin'/To all the people that lived above the buildings that I was hustlin' in front of/Called the police on me when I was just tryin' to make some money to feed my daughter (it's all good)/And all the niggas in the struggle.” The song documents his struggles and rise, discussing how he had realised his dreams. Second single, ‘Big Poppa’ is one of the most recognisable Hip Hop songs of the ‘90s. Heavily sampling ‘Between The Sheets’ by The Isley Brothers, the title references on of his nicknames. Third single, ‘One More Chance’ held the record for highest debuting rap single on the charts at #5, until that record was smashed by Puff Daddy and the song, ‘I’ll Be Missing You,’ which was a tribute to Biggie himself. The song interpolates Jackson 5’s ‘I Want You Back’ in the chorus. The album is smooth and his voice is one of the most recognisable in Hip Hop. His flow was just so natural. Biggie Smalls would elevate East Coast Hip Hop and raise the bar. His ability to tell stories was second to none in Hip Hop. Wallace would be murdered 3 years later, 16 days before the release of the follow up, ‘Life After Death’ (#179). Never before have the titles of two albums had such a sense of dramatic irony”.
Actually, there are a couple more features I will come to. NME published a feature in 2019, twenty-five years after the release of Ready to Die. They explored nine surprising things about an era-defining album. I don’t think I heard the album in 1994. I came to it a bit later. In perhaps the best year for music ever, Ready to Die perhaps didn’t get quite the same sort of acclaim and celebration as others. It is clear Biggie’s debut album influenced a whole generation of rappers who followed:
“It doesn’t romanticise thug life
The Notorious B.I.G. kept things real when it came to describing his life as a drug dealer, making sure to include the downsides of trapping, like the threat of being caught by the police or running into issues with other dealers. That honesty added an extra grit to ‘Ready To Die’ that means its still one of the most real portrayals of thug life in hip-hop.
Contrary to popular belief, Biggie didn’t always freestyle the lyrics
Part of the folklore surrounding ‘Ready To Die’ paints Biggie as a rapper who had no need for a pen and paper, memorising his bars and delivering them off the top of his head instead. But that wasn’t always true – Method Man told Complex in 2011 that the late star had once shown him the lyrics to ‘The What’ as he was writing them, specifically the line “I’ve got more Glocks and tecs than you/I make it hot, n****s won’t even stand next to you.”
One of its tracks was included in an anthology of African American literature
Advertisement
Way before Kendrick Lamar was picking up Pulitzers, Biggie’s tracks were also being recognised as masterpieces of writing. ‘Ready To Die’’s ‘Things Done Changed’, which explores how life on the streets had changed, was one of only a handful of hip-hop tracks to be included in the Norton Anthology of African American Literature.
The samples are on point
Before ‘Ready To Die’ was being sampled by the likes of Kanye West and Travis Scott, it was Biggie who was doing the sampling. While some samples were removed from the record after some legal issues, it still contains plenty of great interpolations, from Isaac Hayes’ ‘Walk On By’ on ‘Warning’ to Curtis Mayfield’s stone-cold classic ‘Superfly’ on ‘Intro’.
The baby on the cover was paid only $150
The sleeve for ‘Ready To Die’ features a small child with an afro sitting in the middle of an oasis of white space. While you might assume it to be a childhood photo of Biggie himself, the boy in question is actually Keithroy Yearwood. The now-25-year-old was hired through a modelling agency and paid just $150 (£121) for the shoot.
It didn’t get the recognition it has now until after its creator’s death
Sure, the reviews for ‘Ready To Die’ were good, but the record wasn’t the runaway success you might expect for something regularly near the time of best albums of all time lists. Instead, it missed out on recognition from the Grammys when its only nomination – Best Rap Solo Performance for ‘Big Poppa’ – lost out to Coolio’s ‘Gangsta’s Paradise’.
Some of it is pretty dated now
“Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis,” raps Big on ‘Juicy’. “When I was dead broke, man, I couldn’t picture this.” The track detailed the rapper’s rise to the top, with those two games consoles listed as luxuries beyond his younger self’s wildest dreams. Later, he adds a “50-inch screen, money green leather sofa” and “a limousine with a chauffeur” to his list, but it’s those initial picks that haven’t stood the test of time. These days, they just seem quaint compared to the VR machines he could have rapped about in 2019.
You could get a copy of the album by visiting Biggie’s Brooklyn house
It seems unlikely that any of today’s young rappers would be found pushing copies of their records from their homes, but Biggie did just that back in the ‘90s, according to Busta Rhymes. “I watched Biggie give away ‘Ready to Die’ and thought he was crazy,” he told Vlad TV. “From his house, dubbing the album on a double cassette deck and had a line in front of his crib on St. James like he was selling the best coke ever. That was like the most illest shit because it was his way of marketing himself.”
The title is chillingly prophetic
The record’s narrative charts Biggie’s journey from life to death, with the final track ‘Suicidal Thoughts’ finding him ready to end it all. The album’s title turned out to be something of a tragic prophecy – in 1997, two weeks before the release of his second album ‘Life After Death’, the rapper was murdered in LA”.
There are other articles I want to direct people to. Billboard published a track-by-track celebration of Ready to Die on its twentieth anniversary. Ten years later, Ready to Die still holds so much power and importance. A seminal Rap album from a great that was lost far too soon. I want to end with a feature from Tidal. In 2019, they highlighted the timelessness of a monumental album. One that does not skip a detail lyrically. It is almost unmatched in terms of its skill. A phenomenal debut from The Notorious B.I.G. One everyone should listen to:
“In a letter sent to his school teacher George Izambard, the late French prodigy Arthur Rimbaud wrote: “The suffering is tremendous, but one must bear up against it to be born a poet, and I know that’s what I am.” A poet wasn’t merely a writer to Rimbaud, a poet was a thief of fire.
Christopher Wallace, born 81 years after Rimbaud’s passing, did not call himself a poet, but throughout his 1994 debut album, Ready to Die, under the hip-hop pseudonym The Notorious B.I.G., the Brooklyn-born rapper found the words to describe coming of age as a black man in a New York City that burned of cocaine smoke and sung the harmonies of gunfire.
On the album’s cinematic intro, a baby is born. Vignettes follow, revealing an impoverished upbringing. The baby, now a grown man, ends the song by sticking up a train ― a thief of money, not fire.
The first six songs that follow the intro ― “Things Done Changed,” “Gimme the Loot,” “Machine Gun Funk,” “Warning” and “Ready to Die” ― all encompass the ache of poverty and how starved bellies manifest into a language of violence, robberies and drug dealing. Ready to Die is an album made by a natural-born rhymer who saw the humor in the struggle, who found poetry in the tremendous suffering that unfolded in an unfair world.
The Notorious B.I.G., also known as Biggie Smalls, doesn’t skip a detail lyrically. The beatings are brutal, the sex is pornographic, the joy is inspiring, the stress is suffocating. It’s writing rooted in fantasy and realism ― too vivid to be imaginative, too unbelievable to be trusted as authentic.
Along with razor-sharp storytelling, Biggie grounds Ready to Die as an autobiographical period piece with emotional nuance. There’s sincerity found across the 19 tracks, but few lyrics better represent Biggie’s earnestness than the timeless statement made before the album’s lead single “Juicy” begins:
This album is dedicated to all the teachers that told me I’d never amount to nothin’. To all the people that lived above the buildings that I was hustlin’ in front of that called the police on me when I was just tryin’ to make some money to feed my daughter and all the niggas in the struggle, you know what I’m sayin? It’s all good, baby baby.
In December ’94, three months after the release of Ready to Die, famed author, culture critic, and prominent hip-hop journalist Touré wrote an impressive profile of The Notorious B.I.G. for The New York Times titled “POP MUSIC; Biggie Smalls, Rap’s Man of the Moment.”
“Though many rappers exaggerate about the lives they led before becoming performers, some are actually former drug dealers. Few have ever been as open in detailing their criminal past as Biggie Smalls, and none have ever been as clear about the pain they felt at the time,” he wrote, praising Ready to Die as a balanced and honest portrait of a dealer.
Almost 25 years later, over the phone, Touré is still enamored with the duality of the late rapper’s debut. “Yeah, you’re selling this poison, but you’re doing it for family,” he exclaims, still amused by a drug dealer who berated his neighbors for suggesting how he chose to feed his daughter.
The way Touré views it, Ready to Die added layers to a character often depicted as only treacherous. “Nobody thinks they’re the villain or the bad guy, right? You’re always the hero of your movie,” he says.
Duality is essential to the underworld narrative on Ready to Die. In this story, no one is pure and everyone is hungry, which leads to unethical decisions and unwavering paranoia. Even success is tainted (“Damn, niggas wanna stick me for my paper”).
“I’m scared to death. Scared of getting my brains blown out,” Biggie confessed to Touré, an admission that came three years before his violent, unsolved murder. But for all the fear that B.I.G carried, there was equal, if not more, love for the rising rap star.
“Dude was big,” Touré recalls, finding no better way to describe Biggie’s career growth following Ready to Die. “Coming out of the Apollo that night, cars were playing his music. He was the total package. It was no performance. He was just real.”
Robert Christgau, one of the first and most revered legends in music criticism and the former Village Voice chief music critic and senior editor, wrote his review of the album in 1999, not 1994, for a book collection. “I’m outraged when anyone gets robbed, beaten, or pimped, descendants of slaves especially,” Christgau wrote, a visceral reaction to the “Gimme The Loot” lyric, “I’ve been robbin’ motherfuckas since the slave ships.” The next sentence begins, “Hence, I’m not inclined to like this motherfucker. But the more I listen, the more I do.”
“On the one hand, that’s a great line,” Christgau remarks to TIDAL, adding, “but on the other, it offended me.” Christgau’s review of Ready to Die doesn’t solely touch on urban survival, but also malevolence. For all Biggie’s lovable charm, there’s cruelty in a line like “I be beatin’ motherfuckers like Ike beat Tina.”
The duality of Biggie’s persona isn’t lost on the veteran music writer. “I’m a critic; I write about music, but I’m moralized, and I don’t have any shame about it,” he says. “I think about the ethics and the moral meaning of everything I listen to, that doesn’t mean I can’t overcome my objections and be taught things about my prejudice”.
To prove its continued importance, Ready to Die gained an honour this year. It was selected to the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, and/or aesthetically significant". On 13th September, it is thirty years since the release of Ready to Die. A work that introduced Biggie Smalls to the world. We lost him less than three years after his debut album came out. Regardless, in his short life, he left an indelible mark. Ready to Die made a huge impact when it was released in 1994. It truly is a Hip-Hop masterpiece that has lost…
NONE of its significance.