Album of the Week #4: The Notorious B.I.G. - Life After Death
This is Album of the Week #4 ~ This week's album is The Notorious B.I.G. - Life After Death
Year of Release: 1997
Genre(s): Hip Hop, Gangsta Rap
Country: United States
Length: 109 minutes
Album.Link
Excerpt from Stereogum:
Perhaps the greatest testament to the power of Life After Death, the second and final album from the Notorious B.I.G., was that Biggie’s death somehow didn’t overshadow it. By all rights, that’s exactly what should’ve happened. Here, we had the single greatest talent of his generation cut down in his prime — or maybe, since he was only 24, before he’d even had a chance to reach his prime. It was sudden and shocking and violent, and the murder remains unsolved. Life After Death came out barely two weeks later. It is called Life After Death, which is, in retrospect, even weirder than Hole recording an album called Live Through This before Kurt Cobain’s suicide and then releasing it almost immediately afterward. It ends with a song called “You’re Nobody Till Somebody Kills You” — and in Biggie’s case, that turned out to be vaguely true. (Biggie was a star before his death, but he became a genre-transcending superstar afterward.) All these morbid, poetic coincidences should dominate the album’s narrative. And yet Life After Death took on a life of its own. It became a document of celebration, not sadness. It wrote its own narrative.
Discussion points:
Have you heard this artist/album before? Is this your first time hearing?
Do you enjoy this genre? Is this an album you would have chosen?
Does this album remind you of something you've heard before?
What were the album's strengths or weaknesses?
Was there a standout track for you?
How did you hear the album? Where were you? What was your setup?
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Shame there's no discussion for this one so far - looking at my ratings I last played this album 9 years ago, but I'm really glad to come back to it. While it doesn't quite have the punch or urgency of 'Ready To Die', I think this might just be my favourite project of Biggie's. It's a murkier album, but absolutely overflowing with silky smooth club tracks, and Biggie sounds so much more comfortable in his voice on this one - he owns the full runtime.
Mix that in with the 'mythology' of his murder happening just weeks before release (along with the title and theme of the album of literally being about cheating death) it really feels like Biggie is back from the afterlife here, bringing in the bass from some other realm.
Perhaps only matched by 2Pac's first posthumous album featuring his own crucifixion on the artwork as if to signal a second-coming, just months earlier. An era slipping away of two tragic histories that are the fabric of hip hop today.
I am sorry I haven't been able to comment sooner - it's been a busy few days this week.
I am listening to the 2014 remastered version and it comes in at an hour and 50 minutes. I had a hard time getting through this whole album, but for three different reasons. First the good - I had obviously heard quite a few individual tracks from this before, like Hypnotize or Mo Money Mo Problems. There's so many other standout tracks in this album that I would find my self bouncing back to one just to hear the beat again. The production here is great and the songs are often really catchy. But an already long album just gets that much longer when you're repeating songs.
Second, the neutral. This is really not my genre, and I don't have the ear to pick up all the clever wordplay Biggie is using here. I do appreciate the flow and the style, but have to read along the lyrics on Spotify to pick up on any nuance. That limits me a little bit I think in listening and appreciating as much as I could.
Finally the negative for me, and that's with the themes of this album. I appreciate the music and I appreciate the style, but boy was I about done with listening to guns, drugs, success, prostitutes... I get it, it's a staple of this era of hip hop, but it's just not for me. I can appreciate that I'm coming from a place of privilege where I didn't have to deal with quite as much violence or anger or hatred in the environment I grew up in, and I'm sure this would really speak to people who did have that world around them. But it's not for me, and that's okay. I still understand why Biggie was such a big deal, and can understand what a loss to east coast hip hop it was when he was murdered, just as Tupac would have been for the west coast.
All that being said, if this is your thing then this is some of the best. It's just not for me at all. I hope everybody reading enjoys the rest of your day :)
Thanks for taking the time to listen! Sounds like maybe the remaster included a lot of remixes added to the end? It's a long album - I agree it doesn't need to be any longer than it is.
There's no shortage of exploitative entries to the genre that glorifies crime and violence, but I think for the most part Biggie and 2Pac's music is about breaking through the ills of crime, and the struggles that linger even after success (that would ultimately kill them both). There's still plenty of macho posturing that comes with it, maybe no different to punk, metal, industrial etc. We pick and choose.
Sexism, maybe above all else, was and still is a big issue in hip hop - we're only just starting to see that confronted.
Well I appreciated the opportunity to listen to something I wouldn't otherwise, just as I have appreciated all of the album of the week threads so far even if I've really only had one of the albums in my normal listening habits (the Mazzy Star one).
I think it's nice to listen to things we wouldn't but also nice to think about the reasons why we don't normally listen to them. For me, something like this album or a lot of the 90s hip hop (Dre, Snoop, Biggie, Tupac, DMX, Outkast, whoever else I'm sure I'm forgetting) is coming from a place of (often very justified) anger with the way things are, and much like I don't want to watch a sad movie a lot of the time because I don't want to feel sad at the end, I don't want to listen to this to feel that anger. I do wish the anger were directed more at the state or the racist American society than at women or fellow rappers or whoever else - I might find it a bit more palatable then.
ok, I have to be honest, I just hate all of Puff Daddy's work. Especially the stuff after Biggie's death, but his albums just don't do it for me. It doesn't help that his skits and outros are consistently too long, fucking the flow of the record.. but that was normal back then.
He's so talented, but I really don't like most of the beats. Ready to Die starts out really strong -- almost too strong.. then tapers off.
For those all 'this guy sucks!', I'd also like to point out that I absolutely hate all of 2Pac's music, so there's that. I'm all Wu-Tang, Nas, etc for that era. Even most of the West Coast stuff after Doggystyle is weak.
Anyway, Biggie was gifted and I think he got with the wrong producer. I'm going to see if anyone has given these records some stronger beats and cutout Puffy's stupid background mumbling... if it doesn't exist, I might make a track or two. Gimme the Loot is the only track going untouched.