'There's Jason with his back to me / Talkin' to his faculty / I start to get a funny feeling / Put the mask on in case his n*ggas start squealin' / Scream his name out (‘Ay yo, playboy!’) / Squeezed six, nothin' shorter / N*gga turned around holdin' his daughter'īig's final sentence is filled with so much regret, we can feel his guilt. The second verse is the dialogue of the moment the duo prepare their retaliation (“Don't fill them clips too high, give them bullets room to breathe”), which creates a gradual increase in rising tension before the attack in the third verse gives way to the heartbreaking conclusion: With the supreme eye for detail that made him such a master of storytelling, Biggie lavishes specific details that make the listener envision the scene: the dogs barking, the blood on the sneakers of the friend giving him the bad news, how he knows him from slinging on the 16th floor. The sound of Big’s heart rate monitor flatlining, a signal he is experiencing cardiac arrest, is still fading as the first beat on the album kicks in.Īrguably the darkest song in his entire discography, “Somebody’s Gotta Die” details Biggie hearing about how his friend C-Rock just got shot by a guy named Jason, and how he plans his revenge. Puffy is lamenting his demise as we hear dramatic piano keys give way to falling raindrops. The introduction on Life After Death picks up where Biggie last left us on the outro to Ready to Die, with his suicide still ringing in our ears as he’s being rushed to the emergency room. Despite having some genuinely great material on their double-disc extravaganzas, neither JAY-Z nor Nas could pull off that kind of excess. It’s 24 tracks deep, and that’s not even counting a multitude of skits peppered between those two dozen songs. Much of this is done through sequencing, which can make or break an album, no matter the individual quality of its tracks.įew albums in hip-hop history make a stronger argument for this case than The Notorious B.I.G.’s Life After Death.Īt first glance, Life After Death shouldn’t work.
Not necessarily in a literal sense-though, it certainly can-but in that every good album has a beginning, middle and end, and that as a whole it’s more than the sum of its parts. A succession of hits, no matter their individual success, does not make an album.
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