Where there are plenty of rappers with more output to cement their legacy (e.g. Nas, Jay-Z), BIG’s is soaked in enigma and the question of “what if he had lived.” He stays in the same mystique as other great, short-lived writers as Tom Wolfe or Marcel Proust. Like the latter two, BIG has two masterpieces and a slew of requiem works that don’t come close to the former; everyone trying to bank on and complete the incomplete projects, riding the coattails of a great artist who met his maker unfairly too soon.
Normally I tune out people who get nostalgic and eyes shrink-wrapped in tears over untimely celebrity deaths. Those who checked out before hitting their apex of potential genius. We have a tendency to regard those tragedies with rose-colored glasses. But with BIG’s death, I make an exception and don the glasses. I describe Ready to Die (RTD) as the Dark Side of the Moon of rap albums. The ether of greatness of Big’s watershed work is that it is gripping, dark and conceptual.
Not only is RTD by Notorious BIG one of my favorite albums of all time but it is one of the most important for me. The teenage years are a time of dynamic personality shifts. You’re dropping an anchor in an ocean, trawling the bottom, waiting to catch on to a grounding mass that will be your ultimate residence. The defining rock will be one or a combination of temperaments: sanguine, melancholy, phlegmatic or choleric.
After I grew out of a very choleric early childhood and became involved with my local church, I still attempted to find identity as a “rocker” through infantile and truculent music and callow fashion from Hot Topic. In a twist of irony to look hardened, I was listening to the worst genre of metal: nü-metal. This music was fittingly made by the same demographic to which I also had a membership: middle class, suburban white boys. Hip-hop was just a novelty that my friends and I listened to for self-aware irony. Among this was Das EFX, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg and Cypress Hill. Little did we know that nü-metal was more ironic, as the progenitors had very little to be angry about when compared to their hip-hop coequals.
By junior year, I had accrued friends of different sexual persuasions and cultural backgrounds. Church began to have a bad aftertaste because of this. To my congregation, homosexuals were AIDS-spreading monkey fornicators. Non-Christians were hellbound. Even the nü-metal I was into was regarded as satanic even though all of those bands were composed of Christians from God-fearing, working-class red areas.
My initial motivation to go to church was born out of rebellion against my parents who had raised me without religious leanings. I was later rebelling against my rebellion, coming full circle back to atheism but with interest in Buddhism. No one could have guessed that my parents had been making the right decisions for me all along. As a consequence, I started questioning the phlegmatic temperament I had been living since the 8th grade as a Christian all the way to my Junior year of high school. Equally as important, I started pondering my choleric taste in music. For this, I thank the likes of cerebral music like Radiohead’s Kid A and BIG’s RTD.
On a gently misty day in October of 2001, I had just had a lengthy conversation with my best friend about the inconsistencies, hypocrisies and underlying malice of Christianity. The Christians who claimed to be followers of the “Prince of Peace” were also politically aligned with the powers that be, inconsistently and unquestionably pro-invasion and retaliation as a timely emotional reaction to the most recent national tragedy. A tragedy that would dramatically change the course of politics worldwide. My friend identified as Taoist. I was still convincing myself that I was a devout, God-fearing Christian. Sometimes those attributes do not coexist. This was all while I was still attending church by habit and out of fear. I had been baptized on my own volition three years prior. My friend was also somehow managing to connect this heathen rhetoric with critiques of the infantile nü-metal that I was so fond of.
After he left from our Spanish study group, I took my mp3 CD player on a walk to the store. I donned a black hoodie and selected RTD for the excursion. Though I had listened to it several times jocularly, this is the first time I heard hip-hop in all of its glory.
Biggie talks about his struggles in the ghetto; trying to get out of the projects, raising a daughter as a single father, his sick mother, gang violence, drug use. This was new territory for hip-hop in both content and delivery. Up until this point, it was all party-themes and feel good vibes from old school “rap.” Rap was not even “hip-hop” yet. The most graphic it got was KRS-One’s admissions to committing crime to fulfill his love for money. The more conscious trailblazers (NWA, Public Enemy, EPMD) was music you could still bump at a house party without anyone listening to the lyrics, let alone pondering them. “Gin and Juice” and “Ain’t Nuthin’ But a G Thang” were party anthems. Even Tupac’s masterpiece, All Eyez on Me, was a staple at my middle school dances. Even though Eyes was written by a convicted rapist while doing time, it still had massive commercial appeal.
Then there came the likes of Nas, Biggie, The Roots and Cypress Hill. Their lyrics were graphic and honest, their beats bass heavy, sluggish and low-fi. Cohesive motifs tied all the songs together in terms of sonic and story elements. These were actual albums. RTD is no exception to this and arguably does it better than any of its predecessors or successors. It is able to take the feelgood groove of the golden age of Soul and R&B tunes, beat them to death and then revive them into unrecognizable, smoked-out loops. It was like the source songs were meant to be sampled, burnt to umami perfection and scratched over to deliver gutsy, hard lyrics. Even with the more radio-friendly tracks (“Big Poppa,” “Juicy” and “One More Chance”) serving as an interlude to the gutter, RTD is seamless.
Just listen to “The What” with Method Man. The music is taken from the orchestral “Can’t Say Enough About Mom” and slippery-groovy “Overnight Sensation” by Leroy Hutson and Avalanche, respectively. It’s a sedated, foot-dragging funk of “fuck the world, I never asked for shit, everything you get you gotta work hard for it.” Here, Biggie and Meth make this music their own, absolutely obliterating the originals to a degree that Jimi did to “All Along the Watchtower.” Despite the source songs having their roots in dead disco, the producers refine ore, making the overarching atmosphere timeless yet still embodying a pinnacle of hip-hop that was also its breakthrough period. This was the second Harlem Renaissance, starting with RTD and Illmatic and ending with The Blueprint and Stankonia.
“Things Done Changed” plays with harkening audio clips of Dr. Dre and Biz Markie, likely Biggie’s idols and influences. He raps about the loss of innocence and how a better understanding of the world opens your eyes to the world’s true ugliness. Curtis Mayfield’s “Superfly” is slowed down, covered in dust and has a tectonic, head-nodding beat for its engine. It crawls as Biggie rhymes without hook and as relentlessly as the unforgiving streets he grew up on. It segues beautifully into the scandalously graphic ode to armed robbery, “Gimme the Loot,” a narrative about a stick-up gone wrong that ends in a face-off against the NYPD. The track is menacing and auscultates like an after hours club. It’s unmatched in its edginess and Hemingway simplicity of rhymes that are effectively disturbing, implanting unforgettable storytelling and brutality that leaves a permanent mark.
The track transitions beautifully into “Machine Gun Funk,” with BIG continuing the raw energy of the first two tracks, still simple and effective, rhyming multiple times per line and giving deadly alliteration combos.
The whole album soldiers on long this. The samples are prime cuts of the beat-heavy sections of old Motown, Soul and Disco, unbeknownst to the listener, being turned into battle and club-worthy gems, the 70’s heritage almost unrecognizable. The producers all mutually and effectively keep the heavy-legged stagger consistent, creating a concrete jungle to walk through with BIG as your Virgil through Brooklyn’s circles of hell. The producers intermittently punctuate the littered streets with casual flairs of wah-wah effects or chicken-scratch rhythm guitars, reminding the listener of the 70’s and 80’s source materials, much like the way our storyteller glamorizes his childhood only to bring us quickly back to harsh reality. The weeds that grow through the cracks in the sidewalks of this urban horror are the dying memories of green grass from Big’s early “summertime cookouts.” It’s albums like RTD where you compare them to the likes of A Tribe Called Quest who came out of the same time and location as BIG. The former is the cerebral cortex, intellectualizing and deducting from the zeitgeist. Biggie is the trigger-finger, limbic system reaction to it.
He gives us the holy trinity of storytelling: the psychology, agency and sociology of the 80’s and 90’s Queensbridge neighborhood. RTD becomes less a musical piece and more of an historical document, detailing a grim decade and a half in the outskirts of the Big Apple. We get a fresh, unmarred perspective on the crack epidemic and its aftermath: the desperation, violent crime, conspicuous drug deals in broad daylight, shootouts and turf wars. Despite this being a staple of most hip-hop, it was RTD that made it so.
Despite the tough guy persona, the album has more personal tracks. Interspersed in the streetwise tough guy, we hear a man nearly capitulating to his environment and experiences. He has thick skin but underneath is a scared and scarred victim who barely and fortuitously made it to adulthood but still yearns for simpler times. The titular track and “Everyday Struggle” has a man not afraid because he has nothing to lose. He is simultaneously fed up with living in fear, wanting it all to end. It’s revealing as Big progresses from his humble beginnings of dealing out in front of apartment buildings to rivals trying to off him and usurp his drug empire (“Warning”). Then we hear the anthem to success and overcoming on the track “Juicy.” But Biggie play less Tony Montana and more Michael Corleone: conflicted between the success of his innovations and the sinkhole of his anomie.
Mixed in with the realism of his hardcore flow and storytelling, Biggie manages to sneak in plenty of tongue in cheek humor. Though he talks about “when (he) bust(s) (his) gats, motherfuckers take dirt naps,” he interjects taboo, almost silly words and phrases, like “fillin’ condoms with semen,” “penis” and even “placenta.” He’s the Tarantino of rap, filling every large space with uncomfortable, explicit content but spackling the crevices with almost infantile buzzwords and humor. It’s silly to read but when hearing Big deliver, it’s naturally fitting - snug even. As Byron said, “if I laugh at any mortal thing, 'tis that I may not weep.” But Big makes the infantile sound good. Add this to perfect breath control and versatile timing and rhythm and you have, well, Biggie.
I walk through the suburbs as the album plays in my ears, rain soaking through my hoodie and likely smearing the ink and graphite on white paper in my backpack. I was too young to remember anything from 1994 except Power Rangers and book reports. The rap allopatry brought on by RTD would not concern me for another 7 years. Looking back on it, this is a developmental Erikson identity crisis that rap was going through. Biggie and the other darker icons of hip-hop helped solidify a melancholy, concept-driven personality for rap. Introspective, austere. While the likes of Naughty by Nature were starting the dance floor, the matchings of Biggie were trying to sit you down, son, and tell you about some real shit. It was not RTD that did this but it was among a few other groundbreaking, innovative works that kick-started my intellectual development.
As I was walking to Safeway and back on that day, racism was silent but very much alive and thriving better than it is today. Like molten rock surging and coursing in currents beneath a solid, still crust. The most you heard of racism were snide, subtle condescensions or backhanded compliments. Ones like “he’s articulate for a black man” or jokes and exclusions of new money versus old money. This was during the first Bush Administration, shortly after 9-11. We had yet to see him go on to a second term. “Support” and “God Bless our Troops” bumper stickers and signs were plastered on cars and store windows, flags were being flow on the fronts of cars and being sailed at half mast. Jingoism was in full swing and those who did not fully embrace it were labeled as “traitors” and “terrorists.”
I got home and looked at the posters on my walls of the unfocused, inarticulate bands whose posters festooned my walls: Stain’d, Korn, Limp Bizkit and Slipknot. I look down at the crucifix around my neck. I wore it with complete authenticity. After listening to Biggie on the way to and back from the store for real for the first time, I quickly tore down the posters from the wall and stuffed them into the trash bin in the garage. I took off the crucifix, never to put it back on again. Though I didn’t know it at the time on that Saturday, the next day I would walk into my church’s youth group, stay for merely five minutes and walk out, never to return.
I will never fully understand Biggie or anyone who grew up in the projects or the crack decade. But with the string of police shootings leading to the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement, the rise of Trump and the deplorables, I have become more aware and sensitive to interracial relations and sensitivity, institutional discrimination, the wealth gap and the for-profit prison system. RTD is not just storytelling - it’s nonfiction and salient in today’s social and political climate. We need touchstones like RTD, the works of James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, to name a few. Especially as discourse takes on a schism.
As I write this, the news and U.S. Citizens with even an ounce of decency are lambasting our 45th president’s “shithole countries” comment. Racism is clawing desperately, viciously to keep its head above water. For some reason, the fringes of the right are an unsightly bunch that just can’t seem to die. When you’re running out of air, that is when you struggle the hardest. Just ask Biggie. Luckily, his legacy and cohort have not died, proof being that RTD remains among one of the most, if not the most important, hip-hop album of all time.
