He acknowledges a vulnerability that verges on paranoia in "My Downfall," swathed in mournful strings and neo-operatic female voices: "Before I go to sleep, I check the bed and the closet." Kelly, in preborn-again mode on You Tonight."īut near the end of the disc, Smalls is no longer the playful rogue, the marauding hustler prowling his ghetto kingdom. 1 on the Billboard pop charts on the strength of a mesmerizing party single, "Hypnotize." There's more raw fun in the "Hypnotize" vein with cameos by Too Short, Lil' Kim, Puff Daddy, Angela Winbush and R. Instead, Smalls and Combs have made a disc packed with hook-filled arrangements that straddle the worlds of hard-core hip-hop and mainstream rhythm and blues - even before Smalls' death, the disc almost certainly would have made its debut at No. But Smalls also avoids petty tit-for-tat posturing there are no putdowns of his late verbal sparring partner Shakur, no words to fuel the purported rivalry between East and West Coast. Too many tracks settle into pimp-gangbanger cliches with numbingly explicit language, casual misogyny and, in two instances, homophobic references. Ready to Die is a milestone album, for sure, but it's nowhere near as extravagant or epic as Life After Death."Life After Death" has its share of filler. Over the course of only two albums, he achieved every success imaginable, perhaps none greater than this unabashedly over-reaching success.
In hindsight, Biggie couldn't have ended his career with a more fitting album than Life After Death. There's still plenty of the gangsta tales on Life After Death that won Biggie so much admiration on the streets, but it's the pop-laced songs that stand out as highlights. It's perhaps Puffy himself to thank for this album's biggest hits: "Mo Money Mo Problems," "Hypnotize," "Sky's the Limit," three songs that definitely owe much to his pop touch. Kelly, Angela Winbush, 112 - and, of course, Puff Daddy, who is much more omnipresent here than on Ready to Die, where he mostly remained on the sidelines. Plus, Biggie similarly brought in various guest rappers - Jay-Z, Lil' Kim, Bone Thugs, Too $hort, L.O.X., Mase - a few vocalists - R.
Like 2Pac's All Eyez on Me from a year before, an obvious influence, Biggie's album made extensive use of various producers - DJ Premier, Easy Mo Bee, Clark Kent, RZA, and more of New York's finest - resulting in a diverse, eclectic array of songs. That's not really the case with Life After Death, however. You'd expect any album this sprawling to include some lackluster filler.
The ambitious album, intended as somewhat of a sequel to Ready to Die, picking up where its predecessor left off, sprawled across the span of two discs, each filled with music, 24 songs in all. a few years to follow up his milestone debut, Ready to Die (1994), with another album, but when he did return with Life After Death in 1997, he did so in a huge way.
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