The versatility didn’t stop there, either. “Notorious Thugs” brings in Bone Thugs-N-Harmony and finds Biggie ready and willing to adapt their melodious, stop-start Midwestern quick-tongue flow to his own delivery. (That song, more than any other, convinces me that Biggie would’ve been fine even as the South took over rap music. He knew how to do new things with his cadence. Of Biggie’s surviving New York peers, only Jay Z would prove capable of making similar adjustments.) “Nasty Boy” and “Another” pick up at least a few tricks from squelchy Miami sex-funk. And then there’s “Player Hater,” a honking and amelodic sung-not-rapped quasi-comedy record that could pass for Ol’ Dirty Bastard, or Blowfly.
After Life After Death, any rapper who wanted to reach the A-list had to do away with any idea of a regional sound or a comfort zone. Mostly, this turned out to be a bad thing. Whereas a few masters like Jay or (to some extent) OutKast could find ways to bring in other sounds without compromising their own voices, most rappers sounded lost and confused when they tried to replicate those tricks. Most of the major-label rap albums of the ’00s show the aftereffects. They’re patchwork affairs, doing away with cohesion in an effort to please every possible demographic. Street tracks sit uncomfortably next to club bangers and R&B love songs, as if every rapper had to check every item on a list. If you wanted to, you could look at Life After Death as the rap-history equivalent of Jaws or Star Wars: an undeniably brilliant work that nevertheless ended a period of boundless creativity and experimentation, showing the powers that be that there was money out there to chase if they put their focus on blockbusters instead of finely observed personal works. From that perspective, a Tribe Called Quest and MC Eiht become the equivalents of Peter Bogdanovich or Hal Ashby. They’re the geniuses who got left behind.
But that formulation does a disservice to Biggie, to what he showed he could do on Life After Death. Where the larger-than-life cinematic reach of Life After Death might’ve drowned out or overshadowed any other rapper’s voice, it actually enhanced what Biggie was doing. If anything, he became a better rapper on his second album. He took the challenge and ran with it, finding new ways to project his writerly focus and enormous personality. The storytelling songs on Life After Death are light years beyond what anyone else was doing with the form at the time. Where a record like the R. Kelly collab “Fuckin’ You Tonight” would’ve been a rote for-the-ladies affair in almost anyone else’s hands, Biggie used it as an opportunity for ribald, horny fun, undercutting the romantic sonics by turning them into a dirty joke. And the emotional songs, like “Sky’s The Limit” or “Miss You,” drew attention to the human being behind all these pyrotechnics, to the impossible odds that he’d beaten just by, for a brief moment, succeeding in life.
And that’s the grand irony at the center of Life After Death: The man who made it didn’t live to see it going out into the world, but even today, it’s one of the most alive rap albums you’ll ever hear. It’s the album that was destined to take over the world. Not even death could stop it.
http://www.stereogum.com/1931251/life-after-death-turns-20/franchises/the-anniversary/
After Life After Death, any rapper who wanted to reach the A-list had to do away with any idea of a regional sound or a comfort zone. Mostly, this turned out to be a bad thing. Whereas a few masters like Jay or (to some extent) OutKast could find ways to bring in other sounds without compromising their own voices, most rappers sounded lost and confused when they tried to replicate those tricks. Most of the major-label rap albums of the ’00s show the aftereffects. They’re patchwork affairs, doing away with cohesion in an effort to please every possible demographic. Street tracks sit uncomfortably next to club bangers and R&B love songs, as if every rapper had to check every item on a list. If you wanted to, you could look at Life After Death as the rap-history equivalent of Jaws or Star Wars: an undeniably brilliant work that nevertheless ended a period of boundless creativity and experimentation, showing the powers that be that there was money out there to chase if they put their focus on blockbusters instead of finely observed personal works. From that perspective, a Tribe Called Quest and MC Eiht become the equivalents of Peter Bogdanovich or Hal Ashby. They’re the geniuses who got left behind.
But that formulation does a disservice to Biggie, to what he showed he could do on Life After Death. Where the larger-than-life cinematic reach of Life After Death might’ve drowned out or overshadowed any other rapper’s voice, it actually enhanced what Biggie was doing. If anything, he became a better rapper on his second album. He took the challenge and ran with it, finding new ways to project his writerly focus and enormous personality. The storytelling songs on Life After Death are light years beyond what anyone else was doing with the form at the time. Where a record like the R. Kelly collab “Fuckin’ You Tonight” would’ve been a rote for-the-ladies affair in almost anyone else’s hands, Biggie used it as an opportunity for ribald, horny fun, undercutting the romantic sonics by turning them into a dirty joke. And the emotional songs, like “Sky’s The Limit” or “Miss You,” drew attention to the human being behind all these pyrotechnics, to the impossible odds that he’d beaten just by, for a brief moment, succeeding in life.
And that’s the grand irony at the center of Life After Death: The man who made it didn’t live to see it going out into the world, but even today, it’s one of the most alive rap albums you’ll ever hear. It’s the album that was destined to take over the world. Not even death could stop it.
http://www.stereogum.com/1931251/life-after-death-turns-20/franchises/the-anniversary/
