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He was a gruff, neurotic alternative to the ice-cool Snoop Dogg: if Snoop had bitches in the living room till six in the morning, B.I.G. What made Christopher Wallace pop-palatable amid such a gruesome backdrop was his humor, personality, and wit. The day that he left, the Raleigh house he’d operated out of was raided by police officers. to pick up the slack, and Puffy called him, alternately begging and demanding the rapper stop hustling and return to New York, devoted to music for good. When his record advance didn’t land quickly enough, he went back to N.C. was splitting time between Brooklyn and Raleigh, where he’d set up a profitable drug operation. But as the demo’s opening line specified, it was only at the nudging of his close friends that he pursued music-B.I.G. The demo he recorded, “Microphone Murderer,” along with a few other cuts, made it’s way to The Source’s Unsigned Hype column, then influential in hip-hop’s walled off media environment, and then to Bad Boy, where Sean “Puffy” Combs would sign him. In 1992, “a whole lot of niggas want Big to make a demo tape.” He’d been battling around Fulton St since he was 13, and was known in Bedford-Stuyvesant as a force, in music and otherwise. “Things done changed on this side,” the sample declares, a savvy appropriation that characterized a rise in violence across coasts, and a shift in sound that B.I.G. Dre’s voice we hear between verses, dispatching from Compton. It goes unmentioned here, but hip-hop’s region of choice had changed too: New York’s first generation of rap inventors had given way to the West Coast, so it’s Dr. Life used to be about funny hairstyles, curbside games, and lounging at barbecues, he says, but “Turn your pagers to 1993,” and the story has taken an inexplicably dark turn. Its intro maps B.I.G’s life against the sounds of various eras-’70s “Superfly,” ‘80s “Top Billin’,” and ‘90s Doggystyle-before the 21-year-old launches into “Things Done Changed,” an opening monologue that sets the chaotic scene.
NOTORIOUS BIG READY TO DIE DISC COG CRACK
Even then, the album was a reflection: an over-the-top, fisheye union address of the city’s waning crack era, and a reeling admission that something must have gone terribly wrong for it to have happened. opened Ready to Die by complaining about changes in the city around him over 20 years ago. The thrill is a combination of fear and gall, rooted in the security that the scene will likely never repeat itself.īut there may be something habitual in New York’s craned gaze backward. Young transplants and natives alike would rather hear old tall tales than experience anything near it firsthand distinct from nostalgia, it's more like moving into a home where a murder occurred. The lawlessness it describes-robberies at gunpoint on the A train, open-air hand-to-hand crack deals on Fulton St., shootouts with the NYPD-land unfathomably to most New Yorkers today. But the shift has fossilized a certain kind of rap album, like The Notorious B.I.G.’s debut Ready to Die, released in 1994. This is undoubtedly a good thing-entrepreneurial city teens today hustle fashion trends to ogling editors instead of baggies to scraggly addicts. Sure, there are bike messengers that peddle weed packed in plastic jars and Russian mobsters who launder money through Coney Island auto-shops, but the kind of trap-house, dope-boy, Robin Hood archetype that still carries in cities like Atlanta has been wiped clean from tri-state folklore. (While in UNKLE, Shadow used part of the same snippet on 1994's "The Time Has Come.New York City doesn’t sell drugs anymore. Shadow once more deploys a sample of Timothy Leary's utterance, "The time has come, Ralph/Are you ready to die?" from his 1967 LP Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out. "Three Ralphs" is a studied exercise in trap, all infernal low-end dirgemongering and molasses-slow, handclapped beats. But the ominous funk, punctuated by flagrant blues-rock guitar and bass and fluttery video-game synth wonkiness, combine for a wonderfully anomalous hiphop banger. Run the Jewels animate "Nobody Speak," which sounds like the record's stab for radio glory, even though El-P alludes to Trump fucking his youngest daughter in it, among other abundant profanities. You'll scratch your head until it sounds like "Best Foot Forward." It ends with the nostalgic sound of someone putting a cassette in a boom box.
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"The Mountain Will Fall" sounds like a Boards of Canada pastiche concocted by someone who has only read about the Scottish duo. (This LP is a joint release through his own Liquid Amber imprint and Nas's Mass Appeal label.) The title track starts with a somber orchestral movement before it's interrupted by a wild yell and exceedingly chunky and splashy funk beats and zingy video-game synths. The Mountain Will Fall maintains Shadow's rep for stylistic promiscuity.