Notorious B.I.G.: Life After Death : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

In a frightening way, the current hip-hop scene re-calls the end of Good Fellas: The major players are turning up dead, heading off to prison or lying low, waiting for the smoke to clear. As for what brought things to this horrific pass, those who know don't speak, and those who speak don't know. Everybody who cares about the music is exhausted and confused. Is it greed? Jealousy? A turf war? An urge to self-destruct? One thing, of course, hasn't changed: It ain't white folks dying. Meanwhile, in a cultural situation that is essentially unprecedented, young African-American artists are being killed, and seemingly nothing – not their fame, their money, their bodyguards, their own willingness to shoot – can protect them.

Into this epidemic of violence comes the double CD Life After Death. The album is riddled with chilling ironies in the wake of the recent murder of its creator, the Brooklyn, N.Y., rapper Notorious B.I.G. (a k a Biggie Smalls) in Los Angeles. On the cover, Biggie stands solemnly next to a hearse; the hottest track is titled, with a nod to L.L. Cool J, "Going Back to Cali" and lifts its Zapp-derived vocoder sound from "California Love," the ferocious single by Biggie's slain left-coast rival, Tupac Shakur; the last song, unbelievably, is called "You're Nobody (Til Somebody Kills You)," a wry acknowledgment that at least in the rap (and rock) world, larger-than-life figures become larger still in violent death.

But Biggie was somebody while he was still alive, and the ambitious Life After Death – a worthy and more mature, if less uniformly spectacular, successor to his 1994 debut, Ready to Die – demonstrates why. Like virtually all double albums – whether by Guns n' Roses, Bruce Springsteen, the Smashing Pumpkins or 2Pac – this one probably would have been more aesthetically satisfying as a carefully shaped single CD. But there's considerable pleasure and fun to be had when an artist feels free to stretch out and try anything, and those pleasures are available in abundance on Life After Death.

Like, for example, the coolly disorienting New Age keyboard sample that underlies the off-kilter time signature and rapid-fire rhymes of "Notorious Thugs," on which Biggie is joined by Layzie, Krayzie and Bizzy Bone of Bone Thugs-n-Harmony. Other guests also excel. The lubricious Lil' Kim more than holds her own, so to speak, in a funny he said/she said matchup with Biggie on "Another." And R. Kelly continues his dismantling of the ultra-romantic loveman ballad on "#!*@ You Tonight," with its immortal opening lines: "You must be used to me spendin'/And all that sweet winin' and dinin'/But I'm fuckin' you tonight."

It can be no surprise, though, that the real stars of Life After Death are the Notorious B.I.G. himself – whose flow can seem both declamatory and sensually deft – and his producer, Sean "Puffy" Combs, the man who for all too many reasons is now sitting at ground zero of the hip-hop nation. Together they constructed a sprawling, cinematic saga of the thug life, a conscious continuation of Ready to Die. Life After Death captures crime's undeniable glamour ("I Love the Dough," "Sky's the Limit") but doesn't stint on the fear ("Last Day"), desperation ("Niggas Bleed") and irretrievable loss ("Miss U") that the streets inevitably exact.

"I don't wanna die/God, tell me why," Combs whispers in the background of the chorus on the death-haunted "You're Nobody (Til Somebody Kills You)." It's a simple prayer, and its emotional directness undercuts – and reveals the terror underlying – much of the mack posturing that precedes it. Those lines resonate eerily after the album concludes, and the listener returns to the real world to wonder when all this end. Or when the shots will ring out again.