Currently Listening

A glog about the ups and downs of the "album shuffle" function.
The Notorious B.I.G. - Ready to Die Fuck the world, fuck my moms and my girlMy life’s played out like a jheri curl, I’m ready to die  I think something that’s pretty universal is that when you’re younger you’re pretty stupid. I like to think I wasn’t as stupid as people who are children now, but in all actuality, I was pretty fuckin’ thick. Probably the biggest signifier of this is that I used to think Tupac was definitely better than Biggie, which - like nylon pants from Hot Topic and The Boondock Saints and hanging out at the mall - is, in retrospect, headache-inducingly mortifying. It’s one of those things you look back on, head buried in your hands, moaning “I can’t believe I thought that was coooooooooool!” Fortunately though, we all grow up, (in most cases) make the right decisions, and we actually sit down and listen to Ready to Die, and eventually it ends up at number 12 on your list of the 100 greatest records ever made. I said a lot about Biggie and his appeal as it pertains to “Gimme the Loot” on SongJournal two years ago, and I think what makes that track work is also what makes Ready to Die work as a whole. But the whole anomaly is a track like “Juicy”, which is wrought with sentimentality, but to its advantage, feels as honest as any of the crime narratives Biggie lays down on this album. What really makes it a classic though is how impossible it would be to make in the current landscape. A debut record with ONE guest verse on the whole 17 track album, a dude who does call-and-response tracks with himself, rhyming things that just shouldn’t rhyme, talking shit on the biggest MC in the game. It’s unheard of by a mainstream artist these days, and that’s not necessarily just because the business has changed, but because Ready to Die is less a threat than an ethos. It’s a record about risk, about fear, about hate, about love. It’s more opulent than Teflon Don, it’s grimier and more lyrically intense than Tha Carter, and it tows the line between self-absorbtion and self-loathing even better than My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Much like Mush by Leatherface or Jane Doe by Converge, every record in every respective genre has aped it mercilessly ever since and never come close to reaching the same apex; emotionally, psychologically, or viscerally.

The Notorious B.I.G. - Ready to Die

Fuck the world, fuck my moms and my girl
My life’s played out like a jheri curl, I’m ready to die 

I think something that’s pretty universal is that when you’re younger you’re pretty stupid. I like to think I wasn’t as stupid as people who are children now, but in all actuality, I was pretty fuckin’ thick. Probably the biggest signifier of this is that I used to think Tupac was definitely better than Biggie, which - like nylon pants from Hot Topic and The Boondock Saints and hanging out at the mall - is, in retrospect, headache-inducingly mortifying. It’s one of those things you look back on, head buried in your hands, moaning “I can’t believe I thought that was coooooooooool!”

Fortunately though, we all grow up, (in most cases) make the right decisions, and we actually sit down and listen to Ready to Die, and eventually it ends up at number 12 on your list of the 100 greatest records ever made. I said a lot about Biggie and his appeal as it pertains to “Gimme the Loot” on SongJournal two years ago, and I think what makes that track work is also what makes Ready to Die work as a whole. But the whole anomaly is a track like “Juicy”, which is wrought with sentimentality, but to its advantage, feels as honest as any of the crime narratives Biggie lays down on this album.

What really makes it a classic though is how impossible it would be to make in the current landscape. A debut record with ONE guest verse on the whole 17 track album, a dude who does call-and-response tracks with himself, rhyming things that just shouldn’t rhyme, talking shit on the biggest MC in the game. It’s unheard of by a mainstream artist these days, and that’s not necessarily just because the business has changed, but because Ready to Die is less a threat than an ethos. It’s a record about risk, about fear, about hate, about love. It’s more opulent than Teflon Don, it’s grimier and more lyrically intense than Tha Carter, and it tows the line between self-absorbtion and self-loathing even better than My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Much like Mush by Leatherface or Jane Doe by Converge, every record in every respective genre has aped it mercilessly ever since and never come close to reaching the same apex; emotionally, psychologically, or viscerally.

  1. roszika reblogged this from currentlylistening
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  3. exspectator reblogged this from currentlylistening and added:
    Ready to Die is my 12th favorite album of all time (and 2nd favorite hip-hop record ever), so I have things to say about...
  4. currentlylistening posted this