Notorious B.I.G.: Ready To Die : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Standing more than six feet tall, weighing in at more than 350 pounds and adored by millions, Christopher Wallace was already larger than life when he was shot dead in March 1997. Since then, his story has been mythologized again and again, but Biggie's also the rare dead pop star whose legend hasn't outstripped reality or blunted the raw impact of his records. His singular persona, his life story and his eventual death are all there on his 1994 debut, Ready to Die, the album that revived East Coast rap and gave Puff Daddy his starter capital. At twenty-two, Biggie was already his own man, a gat-toting, chronic-smoking sex machine surveying the mean streets of Brooklyn.

Biggie was awfully nimble for a big man, spitting even his darkest rhymes with a sense of pleasure -- and always seeming three-dimensional. "Me and My Bitch" is about his girl getting murdered while he's out hustling, but it's also a love song. Elsewhere, he reminisces about a time before guns ruled the streets, seriously considers suicide and plans a romantic evening that includes T-bone steak, cheese, eggs and Welch's grape juice. The only time he sounds full of shit is on the title cut, where his cold-eye precision turns into over-the-top fatalism. No one so full of life was really ready to die.