Another heavyweight New York producer, Pete Rock, reputedly delivered the original idea, and certainly contributed a remix for the song’s single release. Making for another of Ready To Die’s more easygoing highlights, the reflective, aspirational, Mtume-sampling single Juicy again featured Total and offered a vision of the smoother Bad Boy sound to come later in the decade. Again produced by Easy Mo Bee, it’s one of several Ready To Die tracks that feature a shout-out to Junior M.A.F.I.A., the Lil’ Kim-sporting group responsible for tremendous cuts such as Player’s Anthem and Get Money, and who Biggie helped usher into the spotlight the following year. The What sees Biggie trading rhymes with Wu-Tang Clan mainstay Method Man over a crackling, smoky sample (“I got a six-shooter and a horse named Trigger”). However, the Grover Washington-sampling, answering-machine-heavy album version features Bad Boy’s female R&B group and regular Biggie collaborators Total, and serves as a fruity prequel (“When it comes to sex, I’m similar to the Thrilla In Manila”) to an even more X-rated interlude. songs (“Lyrically, I’m supposed to represent/I’m not only a client, I’m the player President”). A mash-up of life and deathĪlbum cut One More Chance was completely remodelled for single release, as One More Chance (Stay With Me Remix), in 1995, resulting in an undeniably superior track that sits among the best Notorious B.I.G. Ready To Die’s low-slung, keening, fatalistic title track (“My life is played out like a Jheri curl”) then follows, again produced by Easy Mo Bee, in an almost West Coast style. Starting with the riddling internal rhyming of “Who the fuck is this paging me at 5:46 in the morning?/Crack of dawn an’ now I’m yawnin’”, Biggie proves his lyrical dexterity throughout the song, before ending it with a round of gunfire. Mo Bee himself excelled on the banging, Isaac Hayes-sampling Warning, whose samples of pager beeps and dial tones underpin a seriously dramatic bit of mafioso rap from Biggie, who duets with himself down the phone and prepares to defend himself in a scene straight out of Scarface.
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Mo Bee also worked on Ready To Die’s crunchy Machine Gun Funk, on which Biggie rapper sprays similes as if firing them from a semi-automatic rifle (“I get up in that ass like a wedgie” “Making money smoking mics like crack pipes”). Previously of the group Rappin’ Is Fundamental (who found brief fame with their self-titled 1991 single), Mo Bee had made a name for himself as producer for a number of the era’s stars, among them Big Daddy Kane and Craig Mack, and had even been tapped by legendary trumpeter Miles Davis to collaborate on his hip-hop-jazz crossover final album, Doo-Bop. The similarly terrifying, Cypress Hill-influenced street-crime anthem Gimme The Loot was the first of six Ready To Die songs produced by Easy Mo Bee.
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A sometimes gleeful-seeming tale of the ramping-up of inner-city violence in the US, it nonetheless finds Biggie cracking jokes with his trademark dark humour: “My mama got cancer in her breast/Don’t ask me why, I’m motherfucking stressed.” Things start in earnest with the cinematic boom-bap of the Main Ingredient-sampling Things Done Changed. The album begins with a contemporary skit-style intro, in which Biggie’s birth is enacted to the strains of Curtis Mayfield’s Superfly, before waltzing at speed through his fractured early life.
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Ready To Die, then, stands as the start of a tragically short-lived career whose full potential was never fully revealed.
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By that point, however, Biggie would, incomprehensibly, be dead – another victim of the violence that plagued hip-hop in the 90s. Through still in its early days, Bad Boy Entertainment had already produced multiple hits, but The Notorious B.I.G.’s storytelling rhymes – both in the form of his effortless thug-rap and the masterful loverman hits he agreed to include only after some serious arm-twisting – gave the label a multi-platinum success that not only laid the groundwork for Biggie’s follow-up, the diamond-selling 1997 double-album, Life After Death, but shaped the course of hip-hop throughout the remainder of the decade and beyond. However, Ready To Die also featured production from several of hip-hop’s most legendary backroom boys, helping Combs’ nascent company to truly stake its claim to greatness. Combs, aka Puff Daddy, and his in-house team of producers did much of the work on the record, and Bad Boy’s head honcho himself played the very capable hype man to Biggie’s star-making turn. Starting life while Biggie was still part of the Uptown Records stable, the album was eventually released by Sean Combs’ Bad Boy Entertainment operation in 1994. The Brooklyn-born Christopher George Latore Wallace, aka The Notorious B.I.G., aka Biggie Smalls, delivered a sucker punch with his multi-platinum-selling debut album, Ready To Die.