If his public persona wasn’t a clear indication that he was adored by many, it was made readily apparent by the broadcast of his funeral, replete with packed streets in his home of Bedford Stuyvesant and Clinton Hill, and an iconic shot of his paramour and fellow rapper Lil’ Kim nearly collapsing in hysterics while being held up by their friend and collaborator Mary J. On Majust after 1 a.m., he was declared dead with damage to his colon, liver, heart, and lung. to be over the loss of their prodigal son, 2Pac, especially with the looming notion that the Bad Boy camp could have been involved in his murder. The East Coast-West Coast rivalry was so active by the time of his shooting that it seemed almost inevitable. His deft ability to inhabit so many space were what endeared him to many and made others so loath to love him. When he invited Midwestern speed-rap luminaries Bone Thugs-N-Harmony to flex their skills on Life After Death disc-two opener “ Notorious Thugs,” it wasn’t about what Biggie was saying, it was about whether he could keep up with the slick-tongued quartet. That was what made him so special - it was only an anomaly when he was rapping with filler.
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Puffy knew how to draw the masses to Biggie, for sure, and while it was a smart single, it’s one of the sparing tracks that is racked with superfluous lyrics from Big. It was undeniable hit, but in Bad Boy’s era of shiny suits and glossy Hype Williams videos, it was turned into Ma$e and Puffy’s song with a Big verse at the end. “Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems” does not have a place in the top ten, either. Both are crucial to his career, but that doesn’t make them the best. A bunch of them made it to this list, including one of Jay’s most recognizable records.Ī lot of Biggie’s classics, however, like “Juicy” and “Hypnotize,” did not. It’s more likely that we would have probably seen Jay trounce Biggie’s career, but we still have a host of tracks in Jay’s catalogue indebted to Biggie’s as source material to really weigh the debate. 1 track “ The City Is Mine” that he would proudly take the reins and enact his own career as Smalls would have. In 1997, Jay very presciently declared on In My Lifetime Vol. Tomorrow, March 9, marks 16 years since the rapper’s death, and if we want to take a guess based on the legacy Big left behind, we can look to his dear friend Jay-Z.
It would be fair to question whether he would have been able to maintain the same lyrical prowess over the past decade had he not passed away. His lyrics were meticulous and mind-bending, packed with brutal double entendres and breadth of vocabulary that rarely required him to use cliché to pad a punchline. He knew all the best ones, too, but never rapped about dancing on couches - he absorbed every scene, and at the end of the night he could give you a detailed rundown of every corner of the room. While there are many in the canon who are adept storytellers or able to spin clever yarns about their money, women, and other ephemera, Biggie Smalls was able to finesse the English language in a way that hardly ever utilized egregious transitions or flossing - almost everything he spit advanced a narrative, even if it was one of party and bullshit. At times he was Aesop, others Hitchcock, often Don Giovanni. The rapper, né Christopher Wallace, had too dynamic a scope, despite his catalogue being limited to his debut, Ready To Die, and its double-disc follow-up, Life After Death. Choosing the ten best songs by one of Brooklyn’s most beloved children, the Notorious B.I.G., is essentially a fool’s errand.
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