On the 20th anniversary of Biggie's death, we take a look at 15 amazing facts about the iconic 1994 project - the only studio album he released while alive.
- The Notorious Big Ready To Die The Og Edition
- The Notorious Big Ready To Die Album
- The Notorious Big Ready To Die Sharebeast
1. Biggie never wanted to record 'Juicy'.
His manager, Mark Pitts, is quoted as telling MTV; 'During Junior M.A.F.I.A. and making the Lil’ Kim album, going into Life After Death, that was a new Big. In the beginning he was trying to figure [the rap game] out. Even making his records on Ready to Die, it’s a lot of joints he didn’t want to do, like 'Juicy.'
2. It is NOT Biggie on the cover of Ready To Die.
The baby is now a 20-year-old basketball player called Keithroy Yearwood living in the US. What did he make for appearing on the album that would go down in history and be regarded as one of the best albums ever to be made in hip-hop? $150.
3. The original Rolling Stones review of 'Ready To Die' read:
'Ready to Die is the strongest solo rap debut since Ice Cube's Amerikkka's Most Wanted. From the breathtakingly visual moments of his birth to his Cobainesque end in 'Suicidal Thoughts,' B.I.G. proves a captivating listen. It's difficult to get him out of your head once you sample what he has to offer.'
4. 'Ready To Die' wasn't certified platinum till after Biggie's death.
The album has an iconic status but many forget that it was actually a slow burner when it was released, having only moved 57,000 copies in its first week album sales. The album picked up momentum when Biggie dropped 'Big Poppa', but wasn't certified platinum till 1999, two years after Biggie's death.
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5. The original New York Times review of 'Ready To Die' read:
'Though drug dealing carries tremendous heroic value with some young urban dwellers, he sacrifices the figure's romantic potential. His raps acknowledge both the excitement of drug dealing and the stress caused by the threat from other dealers, robbers, the police and parents, sometimes one's own. In presenting the downside of that life, Ready to Die offers perhaps the most balanced and honest portrait of the dealer's life of any in hip-hop'.
6. Biggie never won a Grammy for 'Ready To Die'.
Not for the album, or for any of its singles. In fact, it only received one nomination. It was for 'Best Rap Solo Performance' for 'Big Poppa', but ultimately lost out to Coolio's 'Gangst'a Paradise.'
7. Biggie was sued for copyright because of the samples used on the album.
A jury decided that Biggie and Puff illegally used samples in 'Ready To Die', 'Machine Gun Funk' and 'Gimme The Loot.' They were made to pay $2.8 millions in damages because of it.
8. The Source gave 'Ready To Die' five 'mics' 8 years after it was released.
In The Source's 1994 issue they gave 'Ready To Die' four 'mics', writing; 'Big weaves tales like a cinematographer, each song is like another scene in his lifestyle. Overall, this package is complete: ridiculous beats, harmonizing honeys, ill sound effects, criminal scenarios, and familiar hooks'. Eight years on from the album's release, and their original review, they bumped it up to a 5 mic rating.
9. Biggie was dealing drugs in-between making 'Ready To Die'.
When Biggie's executive producer, Puff Daddy, was fired from Uptown half-way through recording the album he was left in no mans land. Biggie went back to drug dealing in North Caroline before returning the the studio a year later on Puff's Bad Boy Records label.
10. Biggie started memorizing his lyrics during the making of the second half of the album.
First his break from making the album, Biggie would write all of the lyrics he created down in a notebook. But after returning to record the second half a year on, he would record the raps entirely from memory, never writing his lyrics down.
11. What was the first song Biggie recorded off 'Ready To Die?
The album's titled track, of course.
12. Biggie was only 21-years-old when he recorded 'Ready To Die'.
Biggie was born on 21st May 1972. Recording on the album began in 1993, and it was released in 1994. Picture: Rex
13. The meaning behind the 'Juicy' Lyric; 'To all the teachers that told me I'd never amount to nothing'
Biggie's teacher told him that he would likely be a garbage collector when he was older, his mum recalls Biggie telling the story of how he did some research and got back to the teacher the next day, saying; 'A teacher makes a starting salary of $22,500. A garbage collector starts at $29,000…You said some of us inside here are gonna be garbage collectors. But we're gonna be making more money than you, so that's cool.' Picture: Rex
14. It Was Puff Daddy aka Sean Combs that heavily shaped 'Ready To Die'.
Biggie wasnted the album to be full of heavy rap and rough around the edges, it was Puff Daddy who at the time convinced him to make more commercial songs and appeal to a wider audience.
15. Q Magazine only gave 'Ready To Die' 3 out of 5 stars in its original review.
The review said: 'The natural rapping, clever use of sound effects and acted dialogue, and concept element (from a baby being born at the start to the fading heartbeat at the end) set this well apart from the average gangsta bragging'.
Today we commemorate the 20th anniversary of the death of Christopher Wallace with a review of his 1994 debut Ready to Die, an unparalleled piece of rap history.
New York City doesn’t sell drugs anymore. Sure, there are bike messengers that peddle weed packed in plastic jars and Russian mobsters who launder money through Coney Island auto-shops, but the kind of trap-house, dope-boy, Robin Hood archetype that still carries in cities like Atlanta has been wiped clean from tri-state folklore. This is undoubtedly a good thing—entrepreneurial city teens today hustle fashion trends to ogling editors instead of baggies to scraggly addicts. But the shift has fossilized a certain kind of rap album, like The Notorious B.I.G.’s debut Ready to Die, released in 1994. The lawlessness it describes—robberies at gunpoint on the A train, open-air hand-to-hand crack deals on Fulton St., shootouts with the NYPD—land unfathomably to most New Yorkers today. Young transplants and natives alike would rather hear old tall tales than experience anything near it firsthand; distinct from nostalgia, it's more like moving into a home where a murder occurred. The thrill is a combination of fear and gall, rooted in the security that the scene will likely never repeat itself.
The Notorious Big Ready To Die The Og Edition
But there may be something habitual in New York’s craned gaze backward. Note that B.I.G. opened Ready to Die by complaining about changes in the city around him over 20 years ago. Even then, the album was a reflection: an over-the-top, fisheye union address of the city’s waning crack era, and a reeling admission that something must have gone terribly wrong for it to have happened. Its intro maps B.I.G’s life against the sounds of various eras—’70s “Superfly,” ‘80s “Top Billin’,” and ‘90s Doggystyle—before the 21-year-old launches into “Things Done Changed,” an opening monologue that sets the chaotic scene. Life used to be about funny hairstyles, curbside games, and lounging at barbecues, he says, but “Turn your pagers to 1993,” and the story has taken an inexplicably dark turn. It goes unmentioned here, but hip-hop’s region of choice had changed too: New York’s first generation of rap inventors had given way to the West Coast, so it’s Dr. Dre’s voice we hear between verses, dispatching from Compton. “Things done changed on this side,” the sample declares, a savvy appropriation that characterized a rise in violence across coasts, and a shift in sound that B.I.G. hoped to correct.
The Notorious BIG - Ready to Die CD. Case has a crack in it. Please see pics for detail. CD itself is in very good condition. Ships from a pet and smoke free environment.
The Notorious Big Ready To Die Album
In 1992, “a whole lot of niggas want[ed] Big to make a demo tape.” He’d been battling around Fulton St since he was 13, and was known in Bedford-Stuyvesant as a force, in music and otherwise. The demo he recorded, “Microphone Murderer,” along with a few other cuts, made it’s way to The Source’s Unsigned Hype column, then influential in hip-hop’s walled off media environment, and then to Bad Boy, where Sean “Puffy” Combs would sign him. But as the demo’s opening line specified, it was only at the nudging of his close friends that he pursued music—B.I.G. was splitting time between Brooklyn and Raleigh, where he’d set up a profitable drug operation. When his record advance didn’t land quickly enough, he went back to N.C. to pick up the slack, and Puffy called him, alternately begging and demanding the rapper stop hustling and return to New York, devoted to music for good. The day that he left, the Raleigh house he’d operated out of was raided by police officers.
The Notorious Big Ready To Die Sharebeast
What made Christopher Wallace pop-palatable amid such a gruesome backdrop was his humor, personality, and wit. He was a gruff, neurotic alternative to the ice-cool Snoop Dogg: if Snoop had bitches in the living room till six in the morning, B.I.G. was getting paged at 5:46, wiping cold out his eye. If Cali crossed over with low-rider funk from Parliament, New York would ride on block-party boogie from Mtume. And if taut flows were giving way to languid hooks, B.I.G. would tighten everyone back up. “Unbelievable” was the antithesis of “Juicy,” a love-letter to underground rap radio shows like Stretch & Bobbito, and to anyone with an oversized Land Cruiser (another change to consider—New Yorkers used to drive). “Those that rushes my clutches get put on crutches, get smoked like dutches, from the master”; you can hear the roots of “punchline rap” forming in Big’s puns and internal rhyme, and the ironic turns of phrase that kids like Cam’ron would intensify years later: “‘I thought he was wack!’—Oh come, come, now, why y’all so dumb now?”
At the time, the album was praised for its honest portrayal of the drug dealer’s internal conflicts, as opposed to sunny glorification of gang violence imported from L.A. Songs like “Everyday Struggle” and “Suicidal Thoughts” showed Big’s depth, frequent references to his mother showed his rearing, and casual dropping of words like “placenta” showed his coy love of language. B.I.G. was a smart kid that had (or liked) to do dumb things, the record suggested, itself a comment on the how genius gets sharpened when faced with obstacles, and an affirmation of rap as a platform for such genius to be realized, and monetized.
Despite its author’s youth, *Ready To Die *shows its age with its production. The beats already paled in comparison to the high-definition score of Life After Death, B.I.G.’s follow up album, and the tinny drums and swampy samples on tracks like “Me and My Bitch” and “Respect” probably played better on cassette than they do on Apple Music. At the time of the album’s release, more nimble producers were doing interesting work on neighboring albums—one could say Illmatic dried everyone in New York up of their best material. The major tracks on Ready to Die had to be heavy-handed, and the filler was just an excuse to hear Big keep rapping. “Big Poppa” was inseparable from Ron Isley’s “Between the Sheets” and snuck in a trendy, post-regional synth line that would perk up West Coast ears. The “One More Chance” remix became a smash crossover hit; the original included on the album is expectedly disposable. Even strong exhibitions of songwriting like “The What” or “Gimme the Loot”—one a duet with Method Man, the other with himself—are weighed down by loops from Easy Mo Bee, a dated producer who Puffy might’ve been smart to have axed shortly after.
Which brings us to the true triumph in Ready to Die—Sean Combs, who’s been able to spot a dollar hidden in the most unlikely places ever since, finds proof-of-concept for New York hip-pop that can carry from street corners to school dances, with the right sonic contexts, visual branding, and occasional ad-libs, a formula he’d apply to Mase, Shyne, and his own material thereafter. The sounds may have shifted, but the thesis remains: drug dealers have stories for days, and Americans want to hear them. We revere the salesman more than the politician, and B.I.G. could sell the hell out of the life he lived. Maybe not all that much has changed after all.
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