Backspin: The Notorious BIG - Ready to Die (1994)
Revisiting the triumph and tragedy of Biggie Smalls’ classic album. (93/100)
Originally published 2/5/20 on Medium
Christopher Wallace was the Martin Scorsese of hip-hop. His work was cinematic in scope, peeling back the layers of well-trodden archetypes to explore the brutal nihilism of the world that shaped them and the corrupt immutability of the systems that sustain them. Ready to Die is Wallace’s Goodfellas: an epic rendering of the rise and fall of a young man seduced, and ultimately destroyed, by the spoils of the criminal underworld.
Even in youth, I was fascinated by Ready to Die’s heady construction as a concept album - only the third I had encountered in hip-hop, after Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet and Ice Cube’s Death Certificate. But in returning to it a quarter century later, I was struck by how much more is at work, from a narrative standpoint, than I remembered. This time around I truly felt as though the album unfolded in two timelines, distinct, but interwoven.
The intro skit sets the tone, walking us through the childhood of our narrator, Biggie Smalls, as he goes from crying newborn to shoplifting kid to train robbing teen, and ultimately inmate. It simultaneously conveys the coarsening of Biggie’s urban America, as it moves from the lush orchestration of the Curtis Mayfield soundtracked ‘70s to the foreboding G-Funk minimalism of the Snoop-scored ‘90s. As Biggie exits the penitentiary circa ’93, he sets the story in motion with a simple rebuttal to a condescending CO: “I got big plans, n***a, big plans.”
As Biggie re-emerges into the world, we are greeted with the brooding thump of “Things Done Changed.” Wallace immediately puts his uncanny gift for painting vivid pictures with an economy of words to use, acclimating us with equal parts resignation, determination, and dark humor to the dog-eat-dog streets we will inhabit with him for the next hour:
And I’m down with the s*** too
For the stupid motherf***ers wanna try to use kung-fu
Instead of a Mac-10 he tried scrappin’
Slugs in his back and that’s what the f*** happened
By the third verse, Biggie is faced with a decision of which direction his “big plans” will follow. “If I wasn’t in the rap game,” he proclaims, “I’d probably have a key knee deep in the crack game.”
From there the album splits into its dual narratives. The criminal escapades kick in Door Number One, grabbing us by the throat as “Gimme the Loot” explodes from the speakers, and Biggie unleashes some of the most brutal bars committed to wax. It’s an unrepentant robbing spree, in which Wallace rhymes as both Biggie and his man “Inf.”
Upon revisiting, it almost feels as though Inf is, in fact, Biggie’s alter ego egging him on. Instead of the traditional angel/devil dichotomy, it’s as if Biggie’s got dueling devils on his shoulders, attempting to one up each other in their violent eruptions (“I don’t give a f*** if you’re pregnant/give me the baby rings and the number-one mom pendant”).
Rapping Biggie emerges from Door Number Two on “Machine Gun Funk,” providing a welcomed respite from the intensity of “Gimme the Loot.” He deploys a deceptively laid back flow to drop bars every bit as unforgiving towards his rap rivals as the preceding track is to its victims. It’s ample proof that Biggie’s got skills to ascend even higher with a microphone than with a triple beam.
But soon enough, we are back to the dark timeline, with the show stopping “Warning,” in which Biggie’s ascension in the drug game has afforded him the trappings of success. Yet, instead of enjoying them, he is riddled with paranoia, unable to trust, and forced into eternal vigilance in the name of protecting his ill gotten gains.
The two timelines converge on the title track and the Method Man featured “The What.” The former veers freely from boasts of microphone prowess to firearm supremacy, tying together the single minded ambitions of the two Biggies, both ready to die to bring their big plans to fruition. The latter is a lyrical slugfest between two titans, punctuated by a hook that hammers home the mentality that drives the first half of the album: “f*** the world, don’t ask me for s***/And anything you want, you gotta work hard for it.”
At the top of Ready to Die’s second half (side two, for those of us from the cassette era), Biggie Smalls is on top of the world, having conquered his domain and transformed into the larger than life Notorious BIG. “Juicy” is his Tony Montana moment: the world is his, as he celebrates his improbable rise to the pinnacle of the rap world with bars that every hip-hop fan can now recite line for line. But it’s what comes next that provides perhaps the most poignant moment on the album.
As the jubilant bounce of “Juicy” gives way to the sorrowful, slightly off key chords of “Everyday Struggle,” “Juicy’s” iconic opening, “it was all a dream,” takes on a more sobering context. As “Everyday Struggle’s” stuttering drums kick in, the dream fades, and we wake back into the painful reality of the psychological tole that comes with Door Number One, even in success.
I had the master plan, I’m in the Caravan on my way to Maryland
With my man Two-TEC’s to take over this projects
They call him Two-TEC’s, he tote two TEC’s
And when he start to bust, he like to ask, “Who’s next?”
I got my honey on the Amtrak with the crack
In the crack of her ass, two pounds of hash in the stash
I wait for hon’ to make some quick cash
I told her she could be lieutenant, bitch got gassed
At last, I’m literally lounging, black
Sitting back, counting double digit thousand stacks
Had to re-up, see what’s up with my peeps
Toyota Deal-a-Thon had it cheap on the Jeeps
See who got smoked, what rumors was spread
Last I heard I was dead, with six to the head
Then I got the phone call, it couldn’t hit me harder
We got infiltrated, like Nino at the Carter
Heard TEC got murdered in a town I never heard of
By some b**** named Alberta over nickel-plated burners
And my b****, swear to God she won’t snitch
I told her when she hit the bricks, I’ll make the hooker rich
Conspiracy, she’ll be home in three
Until then I looks out for the whole family
A true G, that’s me, blowing like a bubble
In the everyday struggle
The one note of solace in the track is the genuine connection conveyed with his lady, which is what makes the next track so much of a gut punch. Eyebrow raising title aside, “Me and My B****” slowly unfolds as one of the most soulful and heartfelt love songs in the hip-hop cannon. The relationship described in the song, born out of the pathos captured throughout the album, is inherently dysfunctional, but derives its power from the strength of the bonds that are forged in the most dire of circumstances.
“If I deceive, she won’t take it lightly/She’ll invite me, politely, to fight, G” he rhymes as the second verse approaches its apex. “And then we lie together, cry together, I swear to god I hope we f***in’ die together.” They do not. By the end of the song, the game into which he invited her has taken his one confidant. But Biggie must soldier on.
It isn’t until the tightrope on which Ready to Die has been walking begins to tremble that the difficulty of the high wire act Wallace has been performing become apparent. “Big Poppa” is a great single and a necessary inclusion from a commercial standpoint, but it slows the narrative momentum of the album. “Friend of Mine,” simply does not live up to the musical or lyrical standard of the rest of the project. Were it not sandwiched between those two tracks, “Respect” would probably hit harder as a synopsis of the “Rapper Biggie” timeline. It’s an organic lead in to the DJ Premier produced “Unbelievable,” where the newly coronated King of New York gets to flex his lyrical supremacy over a track that epitomizes mid-90s east coast boom-bap.
By the time the chilling closer, “Suicidal Thoughts” drops, we have been out of the criminal timeline for four tracks, making the sudden tonal shift abrasive, for better or worse. Nonetheless, it makes for a haunting bookend. With all the grandiosity of The Notorious BIG stripped away, Biggie is left to lament the pain and destruction the dogged pursuit of his “big plans” has left in its wake, and how little he ultimately has to show for it all. After his final words, “I’m sick of talking,” a gun fires and the phone receiver drops. The album’s title has been jarringly recontexualized, the story abruptly ended, leaving the listener to sit and ponder the totality of what they have just heard.
It speaks to the artistic complexity that it took all these listens, and a return to the album after years away, for it to fully connect with me as a whole. I had always taken the “rapping” tracks as outliers on a loose concept album rather than their own parallel storyline, in which the choice of the rap game manifests into a world where “it’s all good,” while the crack game path bares out as literal suicide.
The untimely demise of Christopher Wallace in 1997 adds yet another tragic layer of irony. Despite the fact that Wallace did, in fact, take Door Number 2, and brought the dream of “Juicy” to fruition, the ending was ultimately the same. It brought the parallel between the rap game and crack game, so often explored in song, into stunning real world focus; the artistic prescience of Ready to Die tragically reaffirmed.
By the Numbers
Production: 8
Lyrics (how the words are put together): 9.5
Delivery & Flow: 10
Content (Substance): 9.5
Cohesiveness: 9
Consistency: 8.5
Originality: 9
Listenability: 9.5
Impact/Influence: 10
Longevity: 10
Total — 93
This score reflects the original 1994 release. Some subsequent re-release editions have altered production due to sample clearance issues.