Seth Mayer

The Once and Future King

If it hadn’t been for the quarter system, I wouldn’t have the sincere appreciation for the Notorious B.I.G. I do today. Thanks to the University of Chicago’s decision to schedule the beginning of the school year a month later than every other reasonable institution of higher learning, there was a period in my life before first year, where every morning I would wake up around noon and listen to a randomly chosen album straight through. One morning, for the hell of it, I picked Ready to Die, Biggie’s debut, and it scared the shit out of me.

From the first track, the sound of a baby being born and growing into a criminal as clips of songs play in the background (progressing from “Superfly” to Snoop Dogg), to its self-destructive conclusion, it was one of the craziest things I’d ever heard. Ready to Die drifts between tones of dark humor, violence, greed, nostalgia, nihilism, and guilt, made painfully charismatic by one of the most intelligent, distinctive rappers ever to hold a microphone.

This March marked ten years since the death of B.I.G., and even today no one has been able to replicate the feel of Ready to Die. Eminem tried something similar, but never succeeded in being as alluring or technically skilled as B.I.G. was. There are plenty of interesting contemporary voices, but none that combine wit with the self-conscious valueless-ness that Biggie so successfully did.

Ready to Die exercises a kind of seduction accomplished only in a handful of American noir and gangster films; I think of the prototypically self-destructive figure of James Cagney in White Heat, for example. “Fuck the world, fuck my moms and my girl / my life is played out like a gerrycurl,” Biggie raps on the title track, “Ready to Die,” dismissing his own existence, literally, like an outmoded hairstyle. At the same time, he declares his own skill as a wealthy rapper, drug dealer, and sexual partner in as many different ways as Stephen Merritt writes about love. Through non-sequiters, boasts, and storytelling, Biggie constructs a multi-faceted, paradoxical character through which to channel his unparalleled lyrical technique.

In some ways, this kind of music could only have been made in the mid-90s, when Clinton, consumerism, and crack were at high tide. It’s smooth, easy to listen to, and superficial, at the same time as being disillusioned, aggressive, and closed within its own world of violence and misanthropy. Quentin Tarantino’s movies are also exemplary of these tendencies, but often lack the pointedly dark and uncomfortable atmosphere of parts of Ready to Die.

41.pngThe cinematic comparisons are no coincidence either. The work of Abel Ferrara is another apt comparison. Biggie often references Ferrara’s film, King of New York, which features a megalomaniacal Christopher Walken, wreaking havoc in the city while on parole. B.I.G. identifies himself with Walken’s character a few times in his songs, calling himself, the “black Frank White.” It’s a reasonable comparison, if one can imagine Christopher Walken transformed into a 300 pound black man, spending the better part of an hour rapping about his exploits.


The listener is put in the position of spectator for the first 16 tracks, enjoying his nihilistic persona’s magnetism, which comes from clever turns of phrase and brazen disregard for any kind of propriety or morality. In a strange way, it’s hard to listen to this album without getting caught up in the crime and violence described in it, rooting for Biggie, even when he’s doing terrible things to pregnant women and other innocent bystanders.

And then he pulls the rug out from under everything on a track that begins with the lines:

When I die fuck it I want to go to hell / cause I’m a piece of shit it ain’t hard to fuckin’ tell / it don’t make sense goin’ to heaven with the goodie goodies / dressed in white I want black Tims and black hoodies


There’s something wrong with us rooting for him. The persona rapping to us on Ready to Die is some kind of a monster and in the end, his creator steps in to put finish the madness. The album ends with Biggie killing himself, instilling in us a weird kind of negative moral. We’ve spent the course of an album captivated by a situation that the narrator himself is trapped in, but the author behind the narrator is smarter than we are. Our aesthetic enjoyment obscures something monstrous. We watch a troubled, evil person destroy himself and others with pleasure and, in doing so, we too are implicated. Something is wrong with us—it ain’t hard to fuckin’ tell.