Biggie’s music almost certainly got more attention in the wake of his death, which is something that Biggie would’ve understood instinctively. When “Hypnotize” took off around the time of Biggie’s murder, the song seemed to transcend death itself. Biggie left behind a tiny catalog at the time of his death, but that catalog contains multitudes. That tonal whiplash was nothing new for Biggie Smalls, a man who could make pillow-talk sound like a declaration of war and murder sound seductive. From there, in a moment of tonal whiplash, Life After Death goes directly into “Hypnotize,” one of the greatest party songs of all time.
Biggie finds the guy and fires six bullets into him, then realizes that the man he just killed was holding his daughter. “Somebody’s Gotta Die” ends with a hellish twist. Biggie breathlessly narrates a tale where he learns of a friend’s murder and then sets out to track down and kill the man responsible. Biggie’s sprawling sophomore album, then, begins with that stark imagery of this ascendant young star taking his own life, and it goes straight from there into “Somebody’s Gotta Die,” a grim story-song about street vengeance. That moment from “Suicidal Thoughts” is also the opening-track intro to Life After Death.
The album famously ends with “Suicidal Thoughts,” the song where Biggie goes into deep and unsparing detail about his disgust with himself, then with a gunshot sound that seems to imply Biggie’s suicide. The album has party songs, sex songs, and up-from-nothing motivational songs, but it’s firmly rooted in street life, in the dark first-person tales of robberies or reprisals or shootouts. Ready To Die, one of my all-time favorite albums in any genre, is a stark, self-contradictory portrait of a troubled young man who doesn’t think that he deserves to see another day.
In his music, you can hear the anxiety and hedonism of a guy who’s already achieved legend status but who knows that his success won’t keep him safe. Biggie spent his entire career obsessed with death because he knew that death was a constant possibility. That seems like a strange coincidence, but it’s really not. There is dark poetry in the way that Biggie Smalls, quite possibly the greatest rapper who has ever walked on this planet, started his career with a classic LP called Ready To Die and then followed it with Life After Death, a gargantuan double album that arrived in stores 16 days after Biggie’s murder. When he first played the loop for Biggie, Biggie smiled and hugged him.”īelow, however, we’re stripping the song of those beats and listening to Biggie Smalls’ studio acapella track for his classic song ‘Hypnotize’.In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. He had always remembered that summer and that song. He told me that in the summer of 1979 when he was I think ten years old the song was a huge hit everywhere in New York and ‘Rise’ along with Chic’s ‘Good Times’ were ‘The Songs’ that all the kids were dancing and roller skating to that summer. The track is a magical effort that is unarguably one of the definitive Biggie Smalls efforts and encapsulates everything about his larger than life character in one song.ĭiddy sampled the music from Herb Alpert’s 1979 hit ‘Rise’, which was written by Andy Armer and Herb’s nephew, Randy Badazz Alpert, later recalled: “I asked Puffy, in 1996 when he first called me concerning using ‘Rise’ for ‘Hypnotize,’ why he chose the ‘Rise’ groove. ‘Hypnotize’ was released just a week before Biggie’s death and became just the fifth track to reach number one in the charts posthumously. One such song to perfectly capture that sentiment is ‘Hypnotize’. was that he is an icon because of his work on the mic not his actions off it. While his feud with Tupac Shakur will always be a part of Biggie’s life and his sad death, the truth about Notorious B.I.G. representing Brooklyn, New York, we up in here.” Tonight we are inducting the greatest rapper of all time into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Notorious B.I.G. Adding: “Nobody has come close to the way Biggie sounds, to the way he raps, to the frequency that he hits.
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