It explained Biggie’s drug-dealing past in “Ten Crack Commandments” (“I been in this game for years/It made me an animal/It’s rules to this shit/I wrote me a manual”), his rise from the ‘hood to rap stardom in “Kick in the Door” (“Your reign on the top was short like leprechauns/As I crush so-called willies, thugs and rapper-dons”), the personal and material payoffs of success in “Hypnotize” (“At last, a nigga rappin’ ’bout blunts and broads/Tits and bras, ménage à trois, sex in expensive cars”) and the fear he carried with him as a top gangster rapper in “What’s Beef” (“What’s beef? Beef is when you need two gats to go to sleep/ Beef is when your moms ain’t safe up in the streets”).īut listening to the album today, 20 years after it came out, it sounds deeply political, more of a treatise on the physical threats against the black body and the assault that’s common against it in this era, in which Black Lives Matter has rightly called attention to black people’s struggle to avoid being unlawfully killed. Life After Death, at the time of its release, was generally considered to be a personal album. He pulls off a similar trick on “You’re Nobody (Til Somebody Kills You),” a five-minute meditation on the meaning of death that comes off as R&B-level romantic in its slowness except for its insistent bass, which deserves to be enjoyed during a slow ride in the sort of souped-up, long-and-square Seventies Buicks or Cadillacs that ruled the Nineties. Yet lyrics like “Cuz I’m a criminal way before the rap shit/Bust the gat shit/Puff won’t even know what happened/If it’s done smoothly, silencers on the Uzi/Stash in the hooptie, my alibi, any cutie” are paired with a funk sample that’s shortened and brightened from the Seventies original and makes the song toe-tappingly catchy. “Somebody’s Gotta Die” is four minutes of Biggie swearing retaliation for a friend’s shooting. Even darker moments, like “Long Kiss Goodnight” and “My Downfall” had beats that sounded like the happy pings that go off when you’re playing a video game well.Īll this sonic lightheartedness made Biggie seem likable and cool, even when he sang about the darkest stuff on the album death and killing and fear. On Life After Death Biggie made practically every song feel like a party. While gangster rappers hell-bent on staying alive sprung up wherever you cared to look in the Nineties, the rest of them didn’t make music that sounded as fun. But when I bought Biggie’s new album Life After Death, which featured “Hypnotize ,” I heard something even more powerful and personal to me: It was clear that Biggie was a gangster determined to survive, and as someone who couldn’t wait to leave town for somewhere where I felt less like an alien, survival songs felt necessary. Since I wouldn’t move to Biggie’s Bed-Stuy Brooklyn home turf for another 15 years, I was unfamiliar with his accent (most notably how hard he lands his “r”s), as well as most of that song’s references, including Timbs, menage-a-trois, Starsky and Hutch, escargot, and the idea that you might call someone a nigger if you didn’t hate them.
Biggie Smalls, had a lush, full voice that bounced to match. Its beat sounded like the hardest possible way you could bounce a children’s rubber ball, and Christopher Wallace, a.k.a. Since I wasn’t allowed to buy music or cross the state line, I’d spend afternoons after school winding south past cornfields looking for enough reception to make out the burping bass of Ginuwine’s “Pony,” or the cool intellectualism of the Socrates-referencing Wu-Tang Clan or “Hypnotize,” by the Notorious B.I.G., a song I craved after hearing it once. The Private Lives of Liza Minnelli (The Rainbow Ends Here) The Beatles in India: 16 Things You Didn't Know