Hip Hop Appreciation 107: The Notorious B.I.G.

On "Things Done Changed", the first (non-intro) track of his debut LP Ready To Die, The Notorious B.I.G. says, "The streets are a short stop/ you're either slinging crack rock or you got a wicked jump shot". Biggie, unlike a lot of his contemporaries, really lived the life of a ghetto-bound criminal. From that came a certain verisimilitude and sharp clarity that set Biggie apart as an artist.

A rap career was practically unintentional for Christopher Wallace. He was a talented youth who showed promise as an English student, but he ended up selling drugs and messing around with guns by the age of 12. The material that would become his career-making demo might never have happened if it weren't for a 1991 jail sentence.

I've written before about the East Coast/ West Coast rap rivalry, especially when talking about its first high-profile casualty, Tupac Shakur. As with Tupac, I don't buy the idea that the largely manufactured rivalry actually had anything to do with Biggie's death. I also don't think that subject is even all that relevant to the discussion of Biggie's merits as an artist. For his time, he was one of the greats.

The thing that really makes Biggie stand out among the flood of rappers in the early 90's is how much fun he has with language. It's great to listen to him stretch and linger on individual words on "Warning". Of all the platinum-selling rappers of his time, Biggie was the most talented wordsmith. Ultimately, that was the strength of East Coast Hip Hop. The West Coast scene had, in my opinion, many more capable producers. If it weren't for business conflicts, we might have enjoyed something as potentially awesome as a Notorious B.I.G. album produced by Dr. Dre.

Biggie had Sean Combs in the booth instead. While Puffy wasn't a bad producer, per se, he was a working man at best. The kind of artistry that elevates the best Hip Hop to its potential as a genre isn't just casual and up-to-date on recent tricks. Rather, it's conversant about the innovations of the past while pioneering a few new ideas along the way. Combs's production on Biggie's albums sounds a little too clean and it's just not that ambitious.

The most insidious of Puffy's influence on Biggie's production comes on the double album Life After Death. "Mo Money, Mo Problems" is one of Biggie's most famous tracks and it's sullied by Combs's propensity for over-sampling. Laying a rap down on top of a Diana Ross track does not an artist make. "Hypnotize" is a much better track and I've taken the liberty of linking to a version that doesn't feature the bloated, ridiculous music video.

Bad influence seems to be the plague of otherwise great rappers. Given the wrong producer, the wrong associates, the wrong body guards or the wrong publicist, a rapper's career can careen into some absurd or dangerous territory. It was from the excesses and the confusion of major label Hip Hop that the modern alternative scene grew. As with Tupac, I can't help but lament the lost talent and the unrealized potential of The Notorious B.I.G. Given more room to breathe and less pressure to adhere to an image, he almost certainly would have been able to pioneer some new territory in the genre instead of just being the best of what already existed.