From there, in a moment of tonal whiplash, Life After Death goes directly into “Hypnotize,” one of the greatest party songs of all time. Biggie finds the guy and fires six bullets into him, then realizes that the man he just killed was holding his daughter. “Somebody’s Gotta Die” ends with a hellish twist. Biggie breathlessly narrates a tale where he learns of a friend’s murder and then sets out to track down and kill the man responsible. Biggie’s sprawling sophomore album, then, begins with that stark imagery of this ascendant young star taking his own life, and it goes straight from there into “Somebody’s Gotta Die,” a grim story-song about street vengeance. That moment from “Suicidal Thoughts” is also the opening-track intro to Life After Death. The album famously ends with “Suicidal Thoughts,” the song where Biggie goes into deep and unsparing detail about his disgust with himself, then with a gunshot sound that seems to imply Biggie’s suicide. The album has party songs, sex songs, and up-from-nothing motivational songs, but it’s firmly rooted in street life, in the dark first-person tales of robberies or reprisals or shootouts. Ready To Die, one of my all-time favorite albums in any genre, is a stark, self-contradictory portrait of a troubled young man who doesn’t think that he deserves to see another day. In his music, you can hear the anxiety and hedonism of a guy who’s already achieved legend status but who knows that his success won’t keep him safe. Biggie spent his entire career obsessed with death because he knew that death was a constant possibility. That seems like a strange coincidence, but it’s really not. There is dark poetry in the way that Biggie Smalls, quite possibly the greatest rapper who has ever walked on this planet, started his career with a classic LP called Ready To Die and then followed it with Life After Death, a gargantuan double album that arrived in stores 16 days after Biggie’s murder. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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