Issue #39: Notorious B.I.G. – Life After Death

Released:  March 25th, 1997

Recorded:  September 1995 – January 1997

Genre:  Hip-Hop, East Coast Hip-Hop

Record Label:  Bad Boy

Duration:  109:12

Producers:  Deric “D-Dot” Angelettie, Carlos “6 July” Broady, Buckwild, Clark Kent, Sean “Puffy” Combs, DJ Enuff, DJ Premier, Easy Mo Bee, Havoc, Stevie J, Jiv Poss, Daron Jones, Kay Gee, Ron “Amen-Ra” Lawrence, Nashiem Myrick, Notorious B.I.G., Paragon, RZA, Chucky Thompson

Personnel

Track Listing

Singles

Why Life After Death is One of My Favorites

If you’re no older than about 30 or 35, and you listen to rap long enough, most everything will boil down to a handful of albums in terms of influences, rapping style, production style, lingo, and bizarre references.  The legendary status that these albums have attained is enough to have a major impact on a listener’s experience, and if you’re paying attention, it might actually make sense.  Being the gluttonous consumer of rap that I was for a few years, Lie After Death was one of those albums I landed on, and, to an extent at least, I understood and appreciated a great deal of the impact that it had.

Life After Death isn’t perfect.  Biggie’s singing is abysmal to the 13th power, some of the production is less engaging than a pre-packaged beat on a broken keyboard, and there’s very little cohesion between the loads of guests and producers.  Not a great start for a “favorite album,” I know.  (Well, to be totally clear, it’s probably better to classify this as one of my favorite rap albums of the 90’s.)  However, once the layers are peeled away, and we really get to BIG’s rapping ability and lyrical prowess, there’s more than enough excellent material on Life After Death’s two discs.

I’m going to approach this issue a little differently since I’m not 100% confident in my ability to talk about rap music, so bear with me.  First, I need to get the bad stuff out of the way first, most of which I’m not laying on Biggie directly.  A large part of the problem here is that the score of producers providing their services didn’t really understand how to work with Big’s flow.  Far too many beats are muddy and indistinct.  They fall flat in the background and actually hinder Big’s rapping rather than serving to accentuate it.  The slower, laconic songs are among the weakest, including “Playa Hater,” “Sky’s the Limit,” “What’s Beef?”, and “I Got a Story to Tell.”  And what’s crummy is that it’s totally the fault of the producers.  If these tracks (most of them anyway) were faster and had a better beat, they’d be perfectly fine.

Whoever the hell encouraged Biggie to try and sing on a couple of songs (“Another” (which is otherwise a strong track) and “Playa Hater” come to mind most immediately) ought to be shot, no pun intended.  It is painful to listen to his strained and atonal voice attempt to dip into R&B.  Period.

Finally, I wish all the studio banter and phone calls and other such bullshit occupying 30 to 45 seconds at the beginning of half the tracks was cut.  Or better yet, stuck on individual “skit” tracks so that I didn’t have to listen to that stuff every time.  Even when I was at my height of rap fandom, I couldn’t stand this stuff, though I guess some people do because it continues to appear.

Alright, so what we have left is an album that has good parts and bad parts…unfortunately, a lot of the good parts and bad parts are all wrapped up in the same songs, so it makes a little more challenging.  The easiest thing to appreciate is Biggie’s effortless flow.  It’s like the words are just falling out of his mouth, and his nonchalant delivery accentuates the ease with which he pulls it off.  No matter what the song is, his timing is impeccable.  More sophisticated beats would highlight his precision, and unfortunately, some of his talent falls under the radar because of the weak “1 2 3 4” beats.

Biggie is lightyears beyond many of his predecessors, contemporaries, and successors when it comes to lyrics.  Every other line is full of clever rhymes (and timing) as well as complex comparisons.  Besides delivering the matter-of-fact lyrics, he goes to great lengths to express simple points, which I suppose is poetry in some technical sense of the term. I wish I could quickly cite some examples, but many of them take several bars to unfold.  The most clever raps are hidden in the subtlety of his coded jabs at other rappers, notably Nas and 2Pac.  It’s not all that clear superficially, but if you’re familiar with the lyrics of both sides of the feud and understand what sparked the rivalry, clues can be found.  I find these cryptic messages to each other mildly fascinating, though I can’t absorb enough rap to readily identify it myself, at least not when it comes to the finer points.

Content mostly centers around typical “gangsta shit,” including women (“Fuck You Tonight,” “Another,” “Miss U”), partying, being rich (“Hypnotize”), and illegal activities (mainly pushing drugs).  He even offers some useful tips for those of us considering a career in slinging crack on “Ten Crack Commandments.”  But his brightest moments are in his allusions to the Mafia.  It’s a strong theme throughout the album, and could’ve been a great story to follow during the record.  I have a hard time equating the hyper-violent, opportunistic, and disorganized activity of street gangs to the highly structured and careful rackets run by the actual Mafia, though Biggie was one of a few East Coast guys to create some kind of weird aspiration for gangbangers across the country, a fantasy that saw the ghetto come together like the Italian mob.  BIG doesn’t exactly encourage us to stay away from the streets, but he makes no point to glamorize it either.

There are a few powerful beats within these 2 discs, and when Biggie collides with them, it’s obvious that he’s simply too good for most of the blase material passing for beats on Life After Death.  “Somebody’s Gotta Die Tonight” is a brooding, mid-tempo piece with a simple but tense sample in the background.  The call and response in the hook kicks keeps it interesting, and although this is a slower song than I’d prefer, BIG’s words seem to steadily pile upon each other.  “Hypnotize” is absolutely fantastic and a great example of how these outdated beats can really work sometimes.  Ultimately the bass line sets the rhythm and perfectly augments Biggie’s flow.  And then there’s an eerie foreshadowing of events to come in the lyrics, “Richer than Richie, ’till you niggas come and get me.”

Minus the 72 seconds of rubbish at the beginning, “Kick in the Door” is another great piece.  Several of his disses and responses are loaded into the track, giving it a cryptic quality.  The overall concept is tough to piece together, though it does contain several great comparisons: “I think they got cum in them / cuz they / nothing but dicks / tryna blow up like nitro and dynamite sticks.” Crude?  Maybe.  But it’s kind of clever too.  “I Love the Dough” is a decent cut, and I hate to say it, but a young Jay-Z nearly outshines Biggie on this one.  The disco-flavored beat and chorus drag it down a bit for me though.  “Notorious Thugs” features another strong beat and the lightning fast rhymes of Bone Thugs.  Even better, we get to see BIG really flex his rapping muscles, delivering one of his fastest flows on the album.

“Another” has a nice bassy beat as well, and though I’d be much happier if Biggie’s “singing” was cut, his rapping is a little quicker and more energetic than usual.  Replete with references to Scorcese’s mob film Casino, it’s pretty cool to read along with these lyrics during the song and marvel at all the wordplay.  Even Lil Kim’s verse is completely tolerable and in fact enjoyable due to the catchy meter established by the two.  After 75 seconds of a phone call with Puffy rattling off airline shit and Biggie saying “I’m up, I’M UP, I’m up, man…” about 37 times, “Going Back to Cali” kicks in with a hard hitting beat.  With its prominent bass and more upfront drums and samples, I can’t help but wonder if it was intentionally done with a West Coast flavor.  “Ten Crack Commandments” is very blatantly repetitive, though it does contain a number of clever rhymes.

There are other song that are perfectly listenable, and still others that could use a brand new approach.  Life After Death has more than its share of great moments, and both discs are filled with excellence; it’s unfortunate that so much of it is buried beneath outdated production.  There’s too much R&B thrown around, and not enough talent and/or knowledge behind the rhythms.  That really isn’t BIG’s fault, at least not totally, but I do feel the need to point out what could use improvement.  So many assessments whittle down these 24  tracks to very generalized statements about Biggie’s talent, the album’s varied production, and how key it was in developing Mafioso.  I look at it this way: if you were to put Freddie Mercury’s voice over Linkin Park’s music, the result could hardly be called “good,” though Mercury’s contribution would be highly distinguishable and it would be than fair to address Mercury’s talent separate to the quality of the album.  Am I the only one willing to admit that Life After Death has its share of shortcomings?  Or do I have no idea what I’m talking about?  Let me know.

Written by The Cubist

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Written by The Cubist

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