notorious big ready to die original album

His untimely demise would render both album titles equally ironic and spooky and speak truth to the biblical proverb that life and death are in the power of the tongue. Unfortunately, Ready To Die would be the only album released while Biggie was alive, as he would be gunned down in Los Angeles on March 9, 1997, just two weeks before his second album Life After Death would be released. The album would go to be a critical and commercial darling (by 1995 the album was 2 times platinum and by April of 2018 it had sold over 6 million units) that many consider to be a classic ( The Source would put it in their Top 100 Albums of All Time in 1998), and it would thrust Biggie into superstardom and make him a viable candidate for the new King of Brooklyn, if not all of New York. Ready To Die would feature production by a host of producers (including the first inception of Puffy’s Production team, The Hitmen), but a large chunk would be handled by the often overlooked and underrated, Easy Mo Bee. Around the same time, Puffy was getting his Bad Boy label off the ground, and while Craig Mack (rip) was the first artist to release a single on Bad Boy, Biggie’s (whose debut single came out two weeks after Mack’s debut single “Flava In Ya Ear”) debut album Ready To Die would come out a week before Mack’s debut Project: Funk Da World, and the rest is history. The world probably first became familiar with Big from his 1993 cameo appearance on Super Cat’s “Dolly My Baby (Remix)” (I still remember Big rockin’ the black and white bandana with the cheap looking black and yellow hockey jersey that had “B.I.G.” plastered on the front of it in the video) rhyming next to Jesse “Third Eye” West and Puff Daddy.

The first time I heard Christopher “Biggie Smalls” Wallace rhyme was on Heavy D’s cipher joint “A Buncha Niggas” from his 1992 Blue Funk album. 1994 would also see another young and hungry Brooklynite emerge and take aim at becoming the new king of Brooklyn. While over in Brooklyn a hungry street hustler named Jay-Z was beginning to find his footing as an emcee and make a legitimate run at Kane’s soon to be vacant Brooklyn throne. A young Queensbridge emcee named Nas would drop what many consider to be the greatest hip-hop album of all-time in Illmatic (to which I concur) and label him the second coming of Rakim.

The mid-nineties would usher in a new wave of emcees influenced by the Kane’s, the Rakim’s and KRS-One’s. From the mid-eighties to early nineties, Big Daddy Kane was the undisputed King of Brooklyn, but by 1994 (some may contest even earlier) it was clear that his reign was coming to an end.

Notorious big ready to die original album