Ready to Die Review

The delivery is the whole argument. Biggie is unhurried and conversational, landing punchlines and confessions in the same breath, with a sense of timing that rappers are still copying thirty years later. The production is deliberately friendly, Puffy and Easy Mo Bee building beats out of soul and disco records that a radio programmer could love, and the tension between those warm loops and what is being said over them is what gives the album its shape.

Because what is being said is bleak. It opens on a birth and ends on a suicide, and the stretch between covers stickups, paranoia, sex and a depression the narrator never talks himself out of. Reviewers called it a classic on arrival and the retrospective consensus has only hardened, usually around Juicy, Warning and Everyday Struggle, which move from triumph to menace to despair without ever changing register.

The skits date it badly and a couple of the singles are built for the charts rather than for the record around them. Neither costs it much. New York rap had spent two years losing the argument to the West Coast, and this is the album that ended it, mostly by being better written than anything else in the room.