Yet lyrics like “Cuz I’m a criminal way before the rap shit/Bust the gat shit/Puff won’t even know what happened/If it’s done smoothly, silencers on the Uzi/Stash in the hooptie, my alibi, any cutie” are paired with a funk sample that’s shortened and brightened from the Seventies original and makes the song toe-tappingly catchy. “Somebody’s Gotta Die” is four minutes of Biggie swearing retaliation for a friend’s shooting. Even darker moments, like “Long Kiss Goodnight” and “My Downfall” had beats that sounded like the happy pings that go off when you’re playing a video game well.Īll this sonic lightheartedness made Biggie seem likable and cool, even when he sang about the darkest stuff on the album death and killing and fear. On Life After Death Biggie made practically every song feel like a party. While gangster rappers hell-bent on staying alive sprung up wherever you cared to look in the Nineties, the rest of them didn’t make music that sounded as fun. But when I bought Biggie’s new album Life After Death, which featured “Hypnotize ,” I heard something even more powerful and personal to me: It was clear that Biggie was a gangster determined to survive, and as someone who couldn’t wait to leave town for somewhere where I felt less like an alien, survival songs felt necessary.

Since I wouldn’t move to Biggie’s Bed-Stuy Brooklyn home turf for another 15 years, I was unfamiliar with his accent (most notably how hard he lands his “r”s), as well as most of that song’s references, including Timbs, menage-a-trois, Starsky and Hutch, escargot, and the idea that you might call someone a nigger if you didn’t hate them. Biggie Smalls, had a lush, full voice that bounced to match. Its beat sounded like the hardest possible way you could bounce a children’s rubber ball, and Christopher Wallace, a.k.a. Since I wasn’t allowed to buy music or cross the state line, I’d spend afternoons after school winding south past cornfields looking for enough reception to make out the burping bass of Ginuwine’s “Pony,” or the cool intellectualism of the Socrates-referencing Wu-Tang Clan or “Hypnotize,” by the Notorious B.I.G., a song I craved after hearing it once. How True Is 'Respect'? Fact-Checking the Aretha Franklin Biopic

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