Yet, the track retains that blurry, dream-like quality. Sneakers stained with blood, silencers on the uzis, “Hecklers, Kochs, and Calicos” - Biggie’s slow flow crams enough minutiae to flood the largest cinema screen. The song is a masterpiece in story line-driven writing, half Luc Besson, half Edgar Allen Poe. You never remember how a dream starts, and “Somebody Gotta Die” begins eerily, as Big quietly sits “dreamin’ about Learjets and coupes.” He sounds like Guy Pearce’s Leonard in Memento, snapping into consciousness before his doorbell pulls him into the stormy night to exact revenge on the man who murdered his friend. Has Biggie died and crossed over to another dimension? Did the rapper miraculously recover and we’ve moved forward in the tale? Has he folded the timeline back onto itself, undoing Ready to Die’s grisly climax? Perhaps he’s dreaming. The album’s narrative hinges on how you read this mystery. The sound of a flat-lining heart monitor melds into first song proper, “Somebody Gotta Die”. A sorrowful Puffy sits next to his friend’s hospital band. Sirens wail and a mournful piano rings out over the New York night sky. That is, it picks up where Ready to Die’s final track, “Suicidal Thoughts”, left off: Big turning his pistol on himself while a desperate Combs helplessly listens from the other end of a phone line. The result is a thousand different ideas crammed onto two compact discs. Recorded over 18 months in New York, Los Angeles, and Trinidad, the album’s production was as large-scale as the final product. This wasn’t Big hitting the studio for a long weekend with a bag of weed, bottle of hard liquor, and a beat tape. Life After Death feels more deliberate, more methodical. Said to have been recorded over just two weeks, the record was the bursting of his creative dam. Cut immediately after his release from jail, Pac’s All Eyez on Me was a fireball of raw emotion. In another oddly neat reflector, both Pac and Biggie completed double-disc opuses shortly before their deaths. Hip-hop’s most famous beef seemed to align perfectly: East Coast and West Coast, the chrome sheen of Sean “Puffy” Combs’ Bad Boy Records versus the gruff gangsterism of Marion “Suge” Knight’s Death Row. The tragedies of their deaths are too closely linked. Biggie often sounds fenced in by the distress.īiggie and Tupac will never be untangled. The burden of it all can be felt pressing down on the album. And there was Tupac’s bloody demise on the Las Vegas strip some six months before Life After Death’s release. There was the car accident that shattered his left leg and temporarily confined him to a wheelchair. There was the 1995 Source Awards, “Hit ‘Em Up”, and Big’s turbulent marriage to singer Faith Evans.
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Shakur survived, blamed former friend Wallace for the shooting, and set in motion a cataclysmic series of events that have been etched on parchment and filed in hip-hop folklore forever.
When five bullets ripped through Tupac Shakur’s lean muscle and bone physique on November 30, 1994, perhaps Big’s fate was sealed. What happened in the intervening period would weigh on anybody’s soul.
Life After Death gave us a dapper don who always dressed like he was ready for a funeral. Big was rocking Kangol hats, Coogi sweaters, dark sunglasses, and a pager tucked into his baggie jeans. The 22-year-old Bed-Stuy emcee channeled his experiences as a low-level street hood and dreams of large-scale success through vivid lyricism and superhuman rap ability. The cinematic rise and fall of a gangster gave us the clearest iteration of the New York street hustler this side of Super Fly. Released in 1994, Ready to Die is a rum punch of a rap record - maybe the greatest ever made. Without Life After Death, Biggie’s oeuvre would have leaned on just one album. Rarely has an artist done so much in a discography so compact. The way things played out makes Life After Death a chilling work of dark prophecy. Had its creator lived to see its release, the album would still have been a cutting meditation on mortality, akin to Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal.
Yet, flowing through its platinum outline is the dark specter of death. It’s a blockbuster rap record - all fulsome beats, commanding verses, unchecked experimentation, sharp pop instincts, and mammoth singles. The legend of Big was crystallized on his double-disc sophomore opus, Life After Death, released just 16 days after his death.
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