Well tomorrow it does but this place is usually dead on the weekend so I'm posting this today. Share some of your memories of this album and list your top 5 songs from the LP. Peace!

My top 5

5. Machine Gun Funk
4. Me & My Bitch
3. Unbelievable
2. Suicidal Thoughts
1. Everyday Struggle

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sep 12th '14 by Tom Breihan @ 9:35am

Word around the campfire is that Biggie Smalls, when he was recording Ready To Die, wanted to record a track with DJ Premier and M.O.P. and Jeru The Damaja. Can you even imagine what that would sound like? How fucking incredible that would’ve been? There are precious few Biggie/Premier collabs, but every last one of them is a solid-gold classic. Premier’s creative peak coincided exactly with Biggie’s all-too-brief career. And Biggie could do no wrong during those Ready To Die sessions. Imagine if he was on a track with three guys who knew that Premier sound inside and out. Biggie could be as raw and rugged as M.O.P., and he could be as intense and cerebral as Jeru. If he’d been on a track with those guys together, he would’ve had to be both at the same time, and he could’ve done it. But Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs vetoed the plan. And here’s what kills me: Puffy was right. He wanted Ready To Die to have a slick, populist sense of focus to it, and that’s exactly what it had. As much as I want to hear that hypothetical collab — and I would punch a puppy in the eye to hear it — it’s honestly better that the song never had a chance to exist. Ready To Die is, for my money, the best rap album ever made. It is as close to full-length perfection as rap music has ever come. I have a hard time believing that any extra song, even that song, could make it better. Best to leave Ready To Die alone, to let it be great.

There are a few non-Biggie voices on Ready To Die. There are those shards of older rap classics on the intro track, those sampled swirls of old soul songs. There are those breathy Puffy interjections. There’s reggae singer Diana King growling all over “Respect.” But there is only one guest-rapper on Ready To Die, and that turned out to be a very canny casting decision. The one guy is Method Man, easily the hottest rapper in New York at the time, a guy who carried a mysterious forbidding energy to everything he did. Meth, at his peak, had a dangerous sing-songy purr, a way of hopping around the track while staying dead in the pocket. Everything he said sounded cool as fuck. He had gravity. And he’s in peak form on “The What”: “I spit on your grave, then I grab my Charles Dickens.” And still, Method Man loses. It’s not close. It’s not even a fair fight. Meth was used to RZA’s broken-piano minor-key evilscapes, but producer Easy Mo Bee’s warm, gooey soul-sample lope gives Biggie home-field advantage. More to the point, Meth is still making goofy pop-culture references and silly jokes, talking about his six-shooter and his horse named Trigger. Biggie is pure, unrefined cold-bloodedness. All his threats are concrete and tangible. He’s not playing. He bellows every word. He ends his last verse with, “Yeah, thought so.” It’s a ridiculous display of bravado. This song was Biggie going toe-to-toe with the best guy in the city, winning, and then keeping it moving. If he’s done a bunch more songs with other rappers, it would’ve just been a distraction. He did what he had to do. It’s the way he operated. On Ready To Die, Biggie didn’t really work within the rap universe of 1994. He worked above it.

Every single song on Ready To Die sounds like the final word in an argument. “Juicy” remains the best up-from-nothing inspirational song in rap history, transcending because Biggie knew how to take the specifics of his own life and make them resonate as something bigger, something mythic: “I never thought it could happen, this rapping stuff / I was too used to packing gats and stuff.” He never works to make himself sound larger-than-life. Instead, he’s vulnerable and goofy, remembering taping mix shows on the radio and freezing when the landlord cut the heat off, and using those hardships to luxuriate in everything he’d earned. But for all his warmth, Biggie could be chillingly cold and violent. And it’s hard to imagine a better crime narrative than “Warning”: Biggie playing the two sides of a stressful conversation, slowly building tension, layering on details until those details take on their own character. “They heard about the pounds you got down in Georgetown / And they heard you got half of Virginia locked down” — another rapper could’ve made a whole album out of the backstory that that one line implies, but here it’s just another narrative touch, a piece of the puzzle. But when he does make threats, he’s tense and concise, never wasting words: “Fuck around and get hardcore / C4 to your door, no beef no more.” It’s expert pulp-fiction storytelling, as vivid and brutal and economical as a Parker novel.

Biggie contained multitudes. The whole drug-kingpin character wasn’t exactly new in rap, but nobody had ever pulled it off with anything like Biggie’s level of panache. And he did it so well that everyone who came after, including his friend Jay-Z seemed to be playing catchup. But Biggie was, of course, never a kingpin. He was a midlevel street guy, and the album has even more power when he’s talking about the fears and hazards that come with that trade. He could confess to younger, dumber mistakes, sympathizing with his younger self but still conveying the idea that the decisions he was making were stupid ones: “Put the drugs on the shelf? Nah, I couldn’t see it / Scarface, King of New York, I wanna be it / Rap was secondary, money was necessary / Till I got incarcerated, kinda scary… Time to contemplate: Damn, where did I fail? / All the money I stacked was all the money for bail.”

If there’s a narrative thrust to Ready To Die, it’s in Biggie’s conflicts with his mother, a woman who would become famous as a public mourner after his death. On first song “Things Done Changed,” he’s describing the savage age he grew up in, but he’s reveling in it, not mourning the supposedly-more-innocent time that had passed. There’s a twinge of bitterness to the song (“Back in the day, our parents used to take care of us / Look at ’em now, they even fuckin’ scared of us”), but there are more threats, more boasts about the guns he’s carrying. Throughout the album, he mentions arguments with his mom, ignored advice, times when he got kicked out of the house. He lists his mother’s breast cancer as the reason he’s stressed. He gives off a vague impression that he knows he’s wrong during all his fights, but he never changes his ways. On the album-ending “Suicidal Thoughts,” he gets so deep into his own failings that he portrays himself killing himself, shooting himself in the head while he’s on the phone with Puff. It’s a weird and telling ending to such an otherwise-triumphant album, and a chilling listen in light of the way Biggie’s life would end just three years later. That ending, and those arguments with his mother, turn every moment of overcoming the odds into a hollow victory, and they add pathos to an album that could be exultant. On Ready To Die, every silver lining has a cloud.

I haven’t even mentioned Biggie’s voice yet, a booming clarion that cut through everything around it. That voice was malleable — he loved playing two different characters on the same song, and he could always make both of them distinct — but it was a bulldozer, not a finesse instrument. That voice was all blunt-voice power, which made it all the more startling when you noticed the writerly poise that went into so much of what Biggie was saying. There are turns of phrase on Ready To Die that couldn’t possibly be any better-crafted. “I don’t chase ’em, I replace ’em”: I think I giggled with stupid glee for 20 minutes the first time I heard that line. “How you living, Biggie Smalls? In mansion and Benzes, giving ends to my friends, and it feels stupendous”: That’s probably my favorite good-life line of all time, a note-perfect description of how good it feels to help the people around you. There’s a reason why so many rappers have stolen so many lines from Ready To Die at various points: When those lines entered your brain, they wouldn’t leave. (There’s also the reprehensible shit, the robbing pregnant women and “talk slick, I beat you right.” But in the way the album discusses Biggie’s own failings, it’s possible to think of those moments as Biggie adding more moral wrinkles to his character. That’s how I’d like to think of them, anyway.)

It’s fascinating, these 20 years later, that an album this layered and thoughtful and intense ever worked as pop music, and the world has Sean Combs to thank for that. Puffy knew Biggie had a once-in-a-generation talent, and he knew that you could take someone as raw as Biggie and present him as a movie star by building songs like setpieces, sparing no production-value expenses and piling on the opulence. The samples are warm and lush and heavily orchestrated, sweetened with widescreen production touches like the ones Dr. Dre was applying on the other side of the country at the same time. There are so many perfect, subtle little flourishes on Ready To Die: The way the intro drums switch from one speaker channel to the other on “Things Done Changed,” the slight crackle on the phone line in “Warning,” the way Biggie’s voice doubles up on the phrase “New York, New York” on “Respect.” And songs like “One More Chance” and “Big Poppa” are so slickly textured that even Biggie’s massive voice feels calm and soothing.

In a way, Ready To Die sounds even more current 20 years later than Illmatic, the other impossible-not-to-discuss New York rap masterpiece of 1994 — and that was an album explicitly designed to stand outside of time. Ready To Die was focused on sounding current in 1994, but rap has never gotten over it, and we still have stars like Rick Ross who are trying to equal its sense of larger-than-life cool. Illmatic is an absolutely incredible album, but one of its greatest assets is the way Nas sounds like he’s lost in a dream, completely trapped within his own head. Biggie doesn’t sound like that. Even when he’s rapping about workaday struggles, he radiates impossible confidence. He was 21 and 22 when he was recording Ready To Die, and he sounded like he already knew he was the baddest motherfucker in the whole city. Think of how you were at 21 or 22. Imagine feeling that self-assured. It’s impossible. It doesn’t compute. And that’s one of the things about Biggie’s way-too-early death that stings the worst: If he sounded that confident, that put-together, at 21, how would he sound now? While you think about that, let’s watch some videos.


http://www.stereogum.com/1704713/ready-to-die-turns-20/franchises/the-anniversary/

So the guy from Lords of the Underground isn't considered a guest rapper on that album?

but i read/heard somewhere that its Biggie.

.

We covered by the Blood which never loose it's power



http://soundcloud.com/rayandersonjr

I thought they were joking around so I didn't bother responding.

We covered by the Blood which never loose it's power



http://soundcloud.com/rayandersonjr

Lol

Just listened to it now. Still kinda sounds like the Charles Oakley looking dude from Lords. Lol

You have got to be fucking with us

Ha. For real. In 94 i was like this sound like dude but i didnt see him credited so... Then Mack mentioned up top that Meth wasnt the only rapper on there- i thought he was referring to Gimme the Loot.
But okay.

We covered by the Blood which never loose it's power



http://soundcloud.com/rayandersonjr

I might be wrong as shit about this, but this writer... ionno. It seems a bit much.
Sorta like he hopped on to to rap later on and after deciding that this is his favorite album he went back and picked out things he thought made RTD #1 then gave "his" explanation to support them.
Could Big and Puffy have been operating in the same vein that dude is thinking? Possibly.
Or its as simple as two talents making some dope music without all that the writer claims.
And i think he's reaching with Meth. (pop culture take) Seems like he was extending
back to the whole wu tang clan aliases to justify his critique of Method Man's verse.
I aint saying his verse was better but it wasnt far behind.

If yall dont take it the way i do then cool i'll fall back but it seems this guy did too much.

Everyday Struggle is my go to.

He's doin' fo' much...

my list

Warning
Everyday Struggle
Unbelievable
Gimme the Loot
Me and My Bitch

Still my favorite of all time.

Top 5 would be:

5th - Gimme The Loot (Cinematic)
4th - Unbelievable (Lyricism/DJ Premier)
3rd - The What (Beat and lyrics from both)
2nd - Everyday Struggle (The beat/story)
1st - Ready to Die (When that beat kicks in)

For sure top three on the album for me. And Juicy for sure isn't the worst song on there, as some folks feel.

But only had 5 choices

for girls

the "song for the playas" while "One more chance" was the song for the ladies. The hooks alone display that.

...'for the ladies'

was sort of a "hood NY club track for the ladies"...like a Ty Dolla Sign song can be out here. It wasn't the commercial track for the ladies like the remix was, but hood rats could sing along to the hook

ok buddy

top 5:

1)Unbelievable
2)Machine Gun Funk
3)Warning
4)The What
5)Big Poppa

1 Intro (Original Version With Uncleared Samples)
2 Things Done Changed (Original Version)
3 Gimme The Loot (Never Before Heard Uncensored Version)
4 Machine Gun Funk (DJ Premier's Version)
Remix – DJ Premier
5 Warning (Original Version)
6 Ready To Die (Original Version With Different Beat)
7 One More Chance (Original Version With Uncleared Sample)
8 Fuck Me (Interlude)
9 The What (Original Version With Unheard Lyrics)
Featuring – Method Man
10 Juicy (Pete Rock's Version)
Remix – Pete Rock
11 Everyday Struggle (Original Demo Mix)
12 Me & My Bitch (Original Version With Different Beat)
13 Respect (Original Extended Edition)
14 Friend Of Mine (Original Demo Version)
15 Whatchu Want (Unreleased Original Version)
16 Suicidal Thoughts (Pete Rock's Version)
Remix – Pete Rock
17 Come On (Unreleased Original Version)
Featuring – Sadat X
18 Who Shot Ya? (Original Demo Mix)
19 For The Macs & Dons (Unreleased Track)
20 Pepsi Freestyle (Unreleased Track)
21 Biggie Got The Hype Shit (Unreleased 1991 Demo Track)



https://www.dropbox.com/sh/311vg2967eikcxx/AAA7gQutpye0hKrTZCQRssKTa?dl=0

sit back, relax, spark a blunt, sip a Beck's.....

youre welcome

>7 One More Chance (Original Version With Uncleared Sample)
>12 Me & My Bitch (Original Version With Different Beat)
>

I hate that they couldn't clear the samples to these. I understand why they didn't clear them though. Especially the Minnie joint.

Great way to revisit an over-listened-to classic. Need more stuff like this in my life.

Alot of these I don't have just for nostalgic/collection purposes..bet

game-changing, classic, flawed album. To me Ready To Die is at the top of the heap when it comes to that classification....

...do you really think it was "game-changing"? I don't know that I feel comfortable giving it that description. Like it or not they were clearly aiming to make an east coast Death Row album, IMO. And I'm not really dissing it at all. I love this album.

note: value neutral statement

the album was not in & of itself

I'm not trying to be difficult either I assure you....just trying to understand your point.

Life After Death may have been a game changer but RtD wasn't in & of itself, it was a good/great rap album

the way Biggie rose to a level he could change the game were his singles & guest shots,his charisma & ability to appeal to a variety of listeners

even his biggest underground tracks were B sides & the biggest hit off his album wasn't even on the album in any similar form but existed in TWO popular remix versions

RtD > RD tho lol

>Life After Death may have been a game changer but RtD wasn't
>in & of itself, it was a good/great rap album
>
>the way Biggie rose to a level he could change the game were
>his singles & guest shots,his charisma & ability to appeal to
>a variety of listeners

I think Snoop beat him to the punch in this regard, though. That's why I'm questioning it. I think it continued the trend but I don't think it was the game changer.


>even his biggest underground tracks were B sides & the biggest
>hit off his album wasn't even on the album in any similar form
>but existed in TWO popular remix versions
>
>RtD > RD tho lol
>

Snoop was not viewed as being the kind of lyricist Biggie was (i'll give Snoop Deep Cover but this idea he was at any point a "lyricist" is faulty IMO) and Biggie being an East Coast/NY dude when a lot of us were still very biased to NY meant something...that a hardcore NY rapper could drop and go pop, could balance the hardcore crack dealer street image w/ the ladies love image cribbed from Cool J...

I think I get what you're saying.

I'm the opposite of you, I'm a little West Coast biased so that may be why it was taking me a bit to understand, but I do see where you're coming from, though I am still not sure if I totally agree.

And again - I need to make totally clear that I love Ready to Die and think it's a classic despite it's flaws. I just am careful to throw around "game changer" since I think that needs to be reserved for a certain few albums/artists.

Yes...it changed the way (for better and for worse) on how rappers recorded singles....It was hardcore at times....But it was also blatantly commercial to the point where production values became very obvious...

The thing is Biggie was so great that you looked the other way most of the time when Puff was straight jacking hits....

>
>
>Yes...it changed the way (for better and for worse) on how
>rappers recorded singles....It was hardcore at times....But it
>was also blatantly commercial to the point where production
>values became very obvious...
>
>The thing is Biggie was so great that you looked the other way
>most of the time when Puff was straight jacking hits....

...but I think Death Row had most of the above cornered before Bad Boy started doing that. Bad Boy just took it to another level. But that was the whole storyline about Dre's production from The Chronic and onward. He took hardcore music and made it accessible to the masses. But I guess Bad Boy just took it a little further.

>>
>>
>>Yes...it changed the way (for better and for worse) on how
>>rappers recorded singles....It was hardcore at times....But
>it
>>was also blatantly commercial to the point where production
>>values became very obvious...
>>
>>The thing is Biggie was so great that you looked the other
>way
>>most of the time when Puff was straight jacking hits....
>
>...but I think Death Row had most of the above cornered before
>Bad Boy started doing that. Bad Boy just took it to another
>level. But that was the whole storyline about Dre's production
>from The Chronic and onward. He took hardcore music and made
>it accessible to the masses. But I guess Bad Boy just took it
>a little further.


Nah man...there was an art to what Dre and them was doing when they sampled heavy....Beyond the "Mothership Connection" ("Let Me Ride") a lot of the straight forward play-overs was done with live instruments and often times flipped...And most of the times Dre was taking songs that was forgotten ("Lil Ghetto Boys")...Nobody outside of DJ Quick was doing that because finding musicians to capture those old songs was tough and at the very least was a bit too time consuming and ate up too much of the budget...

When Puff and his team wanted to go for that commercial brass ring they usually were shameless about it...lol...They jacked the exact recordings and raised the bass levels and that was about it...

In other words, Puff and his crew went the lazy route....But Biggie was so great that we often times looked the other way...

>When Puff and his team wanted to go for that commercial brass
>ring they usually were shameless about it...lol...They jacked
>the exact recordings and raised the bass levels and that was
>about it...
>
>In other words, Puff and his crew went the lazy route....But
>Biggie was so great that we often times looked the other
>way...

20 years ago today this masterpiece was released. Many people will disagree about which album is the best rap album of all time, but anyone would be hard pressed to name a more cinematic album. As soon you pressed play and heard that intro, you realized that you were listening to a movie on wax/cd/cassette. Biggie had a way of painting vivid pictures with his rhymes so that even if he was talking about a situation you had never experienced, you could still see it in full color in your mind. Living on the West Coast, you didn't always get exposed to rap from the east, but I remember being at a coffee shop next to where I lived and reading the issue of Rolling Stone that had the review for Ready To Die in it, and they lauded it so much that I rushed to Musicland on 3rd and Pike the next day and copped the album. Its rare that an album lives up to that kind of hype, but it was even better than Rolling Stone had made it out to be. I'll be playing this front-to-back today, and if you're not then do your ears a favor and let them "watch" this movie today.

VIBE
Biggie's 'Ready To Die' Is Hip-Hop's Most Flawed Classic Album
Keith Murphy


It happens. The moment you realize that a game-changing, landmark album is a bold, yet uneven affair; that one of the statement-making, genre-defying musical works held closely to an entire generation's heart also happens to be a project that triumphs mainly due to the sheer breathless lyrical dexterity and roughish yet lovable charm of its Brooklyn, New York born author.

So it can finally be said: The Notorious B.I.G.'s iconic 1994 debut Ready To Die is hip-hop's most flawed classic work.

The late, transformative Christopher Wallace's debut edges out such universally lauded, highly impactful yet inconsistent albums as N.W.A.'s Straight Outta Compton (1988); Method Man's Tical (1994); the Fugees' The Score (1996); Jay-Z's Vol. 2... Hard Knock Life (1998); and Kanye West's The College Dropout (2004).

The Sean "Puff Daddy" Combs orchestrated set changed the commercial fortunes for his newly christened Bad Boy label and more importantly an entire coast. But the success of Biggie's Ready To Die would also have unforeseen dubious consequences, opening the door for a stampede of copycats that figured if one artist could more or less brazenly jack an early '80s R&B hit's groove, chorus and name (Mtume's "Juicy Fruit") and ride off to crossover glory then why not them? (We'll get back to that later.)

Ready To Die's stumble to greatness can be attributed to the album's opportunistic production, which at times does not even try to hide it's ambition to be the East Coast equivalent to LA's cinematic, gangsta rap world of Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, who up to that point were selling more units than their NYC counterparts. The sweeping opening track, "Things Done Changed," could have been taken straight from a scene out of Superfly, the influential '70s Blaxploitation film that spawned Curtis Mayfield's legendary soundtrack, a go-to sample haven for many a Cali-rap producer. Hell, Dre's vocals from The Chronic's "Lil' Ghetto Boy" are front-and-center on the track's ominous chorus. And Ready To Die's most omnipresent hit "Big Poppa" flaunts the West Coast's signature Moog keyboard sound.

Biggie and Puff were not messing around, and for good reason. For rap purists, 1994 is only edged out slightly by the mythical 1988 as the greatest year in hip-hop. Indeed, the competition was as eclectic as it was breathtaking. Nas was redefining the parameters for lyricism with his deified debut Illmatic. Scarface dropped rap's most compelling testimony on death ever recorded with The Diary while Redman brilliantly turned up the levels of weirdness with Dare Iz A Darkside. Death Row Records was continuing it's dominant reign with the hit-spawning soundtrack for Above The Rim. Stress: The Extinction Agenda popped with genius complexity giving a well deserved spotlight to Organized Konfusion. Common began his string of classic works with his barebones Resurrection. And hip-hop band the Roots and Atlanta representatives OutKast released albums (Do You Want More?!!!??! and Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, respectively) that would respectively set the stage for two of the artform's most indelible and adventurous runs.

Compared to the seemingly more organic offerings from the Notorious B.I.G.'s peers, Ready To Die came off as an all-too-telegraphed professional hit job; an album that might as well have been titled "Triple Platinum Or Die Tryin.'" But it's not just the collection's at times ballsy appropriation of the West Coast aesthetic that makes for a glaring chink in the shiny suit. There are a few lyrical miscues as well, most notably the alter ego gimmickry of "Gimmie the Loot." Bad Biggie will rob a pregnant woman of her baby rings and number one mom pendant. Psychotic Biggie gets gleeful at the mere thought of shooting up the place ("Have his mother singing 'It's so hard...!'"). Amid Big's more nuanced, savvy (and layered!) wordplay on tracks like "The What," and "Unbelievable," and the effortless storytelling of "Warning," "Me & My Bitch," and "Suicidal Thoughts," "Gimmie the Loot" cuts an amateurish, ham-fisted profile.

There are even a few throwaways amongst the bunch. The plodding dancehall reggae-taxed "Respect" must've been an inside joke between Biggie and Puff and the original "One More Chance," while more than decent, is a static afterthought when placed next to it's more polished, realized radio-aimed remix single.

But even as you attempt to roll out such grievances and cut down the aforementioned rags-to-riches cookout favorite "Juicy" for green-lighting the lazy trend of blatant song jacking—Foxy Brown's "Big Bad Mama" (Carl Thomas' "She's a Bad Mama Jama"), The Firm's "Firm Biz" (Teena Marie's "Square Biz"), Puffy's "Been Around The World" (David Bowie's "Let's Dance"), just to name a few—you are silenced by the big man's irrefutable gift.

Biggie holds the entire thing together often times raising above average material to rewind-worthy workouts. Let's be serious. Could any other respected MC in 1994 get away with with the blatant chick-song pandering of "One More Chance?" The quick answer is no. Big's ability to deliver on all levels makes him perhaps technically the most complete MC of his era. Loverman Biggie ("Big Poppa") was just as believable as menacing, scary-as-fuck Biggie ("Warning"), super-lyrical Biggie ("Unbelievable") and funny-ass Biggie ("Machine Gun Funk"). This rare skill-set was thoroughly realized on his posthumous 1997 follow-up Life After Death.

The good news is MCs ranging from rivals Drake and Kendrick Lamar to Kanye West and Nicki Minaj have picked up on Biggie's boundless approach to lyricism, at times embracing his shameless commercial ambitions with no hint of irony or artistic conflict. The bad news? Sometimes it produces stuff like this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17O3lL1aUrg). —Keith Murphy (@murphdogg29)

link: http://www.vibe.com/article/unpopular-opinion-biggies-ready-die-hip-hops-most-flawed-classic-album

I usually rock with you murphdogg, but....WHAT????

>I usually rock with you murphdogg, but....WHAT????


I always felt it was too forced and corny in some spots....

Ok

He's spitting...In a very sick manner...that's my point....

His verses compared to someone like Pun on the song of that very title make them come off very simple and basic.

but i think ready to die was for all its polish, still very much a hardcore east coast album. life after death is when the polish went too far. but on ready to die, it was still rugged.

yeah juicy sampled an 80s hit, which was pretty diff from everyone else, but it wasnt that diff from other NY rappers at the time. kurious' im kurious, nas' it aint hard to tell and juicy, all did the same thing, but they were all still for rap fans too - it wasnt like anyone dumbed down their rhymes, which i think was the difference to what came later.

but they were basically anomalies on albums that were otherwise still hardcore. the only problem i have with ready to die is some of the skits and that it starts to drag a bit with the diana king song, friend of mine and me and my bitch, but even those songs have their redeeming aspects, i.e. biggie. he makes even the slightly dull songs decent (and you can find memorable lines/moments on all of them, theyre not total filler, which shows how good/on form he really was).

i would put the classic but flawed label on life after death much more than ready to die. life after death was era-defining/dominating, but for me, its seriously hampered by those ambitions ruining/softening biggies style. life after death is very much a bad boy album, but ready to die, is maybe as pure as biggie got (even allowing for him saying that he had to tone it down a bit).

and criticising gimme the loot is sacrilege! lol.

There's more grit on that album than polish. People mistake the remixes for the album itself. That said it's flawed and always has been. It's not a classic in my book just a really dope to great album. Could just be my sensibilities though.

that or vibe needs better editors

Typo homie...it happens....lol

5. The What
4. Gimme The Loot
3. Warning
2. Unbelievable
1. Machine Gun Funk

Album was super dope. I never play it or any of BIGs albums honestly. I'm more of a Nas guy. It's weird but I enjoy It Was Written more than any of BIG or Jay's albums. Neither put on a rap clinic like that. I always felt the production on this album could have been better outside of Easy Mo Bee's contributions. I do like that BIG is the star of his album, not features or the producers. You listen to every song because you want to hear him.