In a previous era, Biggie might’ve recorded “Somebody’s Gotta Die” over tense, urgent New York neck-snap music. But Ready To Die is practically lo-fi compared to Life After Death. As Biggie’s words about killing a baby fade, we hear sound effects: pattering rain, rumbling thunder, a kid crying.įor a 1994 New York rap album, Biggie’s debut Ready To Die had been awfully lush and cinematic. Puffy builds the album the same way Michael Bay might put together a movie. Biggie didn’t live to see any of them, but there must’ve been something in the air - and, in any case, he did live to see 1996’s tonally whiplash-inducing Long Kiss Goodnight, since he named a song after it. And like Life After Death, those movies did tremendous numbers. Those movies are huge and overwhelming and weird as fuck, with tender emotional moments awkwardly sandwiched in between explosive setpieces. 1997, the year of Life After Death, was also the year of Face/Off and Con Air and Air Force One. And yet Biggie made it work because he made everything work.Ĭonsider: The late ’90s were the era of the overstuffed megabudget Hollywood action movie.
It’s hard to imagine a more abrupt, disorienting transition.
And from there, we go directly into “Hypnotize,” one of the greatest party-songs in rap history. It ends with narrative jolt as nasty as anything you’ll find in a transgressive European art movie: Biggie suddenly realizes he’s accidentally shot his enemy’s baby daughter. It’s a song about plotting the death of someone who killed one of Biggie’s friends, and he renders it in minute, granular detail, building tension like a master auteur. Consider: The album’s first song - after an eerily prophetic skit in which Puffy sits at a comatose Biggie’s bedside, lamenting - is “Somebody’s Gotta Die,” one of Biggie’s most breathlessly intense story-songs. In fact, it might contain too many multitudes. And if you play them at a party tonight, you will learn that they still work.īut those songs do not, of course, represent the totality of Life After Death. They were pure party music, some of the most beautifully realized of my lifetime. But nobody thought of those songs as hard street records. On “Hypnotize,” he rapped about avoiding prison by kidnapping an accuser’s daughter. On “Mo Money Mo Problems,” Biggie rapped about paranoia, about being sure feds were still after him. Biggie wasn’t holding back on those songs. Bad Boy had been doing just fine for itself before those singles hit, but the bottle-popping, shiny-suit-rocking, expensive-sample-flaunting aesthetic really came into being with those two jolts of bracing, big-budget euphoria.Īs a producer, Puffy drew on the dizzy opulence of the disco era, using that flash and pizazz to animate Biggie raps that were just as grimy and charismatic as they’d ever been. “Mo Money Mo Problems” and “Hypnotize,” the album’s first single, represent the dawn of the Bad Boy era. (Seriously: That thing was never off, and it was never any other song.) I liked that song, then hated it, then learned to love it. It wrote its own narrative.ĭuring the summer of 1997, no song was more inescapable than “Mo Money Mo Problems” - not even Puff Daddy’s chart-dominating Biggie elegy “I’ll Be Missing You.” That summer, I was a camp counselor, and one of my co-workers would walk around with a boom box playing “Mo Money Mo Problems” on endless repeat. It became a document of celebration, not sadness. And yet Life After Death took on a life of its own. (Biggie was a star before his death, but he became a genre-transcending superstar afterward.) All these morbid, poetic coincidences should dominate the album’s narrative. It ends with a song called “You’re Nobody Till Somebody Kills You” - and in Biggie’s case, that turned out to be vaguely true. It is called Life After Death, which is, in retrospect, even weirder than Hole recording an album called Live Through This before Kurt Cobain’s suicide and then releasing it almost immediately afterward. Life After Death came out barely two weeks later. It was sudden and shocking and violent, and the murder remains unsolved. Here, we had the single greatest talent of his generation cut down in his prime - or maybe, since he was only 24, before he’d even had a chance to reach his prime. By all rights, that’s exactly what should’ve happened. Perhaps the greatest testament to the power of Life After Death, the second and final album from the Notorious B.I.G., was that Biggie’s death somehow didn’t overshadow it.