The Notorious BIG - Ready to Die (w/ guest Adam from Driving in the Dark)

The Great Albums

Bill Lambusta

Music, Music Commentary

4.3 • 760 Ratings

🗓️ 14 March 2016

⏱️ 149 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A few weeks ago, Adam from the Driving in the Dark podcast kindly sent us an intriguing and convincing email on the virtues of rap music, pointing to The Notorious BIG's Ready to Die (1994, Bad Boy) as a great example of a singular vision executed with precision that would definitely benefit from the Great Albums treatment. So we immediately invited him to join us in a discussion. Adam turned out to be a well of knowledge about rap artists and the history of the genre's development over the last 40 years. On this podcast, we chronicle Adam's first experiences with rap music and this album before recounting how Christopher Wallace (AKA Biggie Smalls) went from teenage hustler to one of rap's most respected icons. Adam spends a lot of time kindly explaining the art of rap to Bill as the latter challenges himself with an album from a genre he doesn't have much experience with. During our track by track review of Ready to Die, we also discuss the function of narrative in rap, the evolution of Biggie's deep, smooth flow, the glorification of violence, literal interpretations of what rappers do on their albums, Brian's taste in rap music, Biggie's humor, his development as a pop songwriter, the unique choice of shout outs, the hypocrisy and contradictions present on the lyrics all throughout the album, juvenile sex skits, Biggie meeting Michael Jackson, and make sure to listen the fatigue we all push through as we have one of our longest conversations ever!

Transcript

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0:00.0	Check it now
0:07.0	To all the ladies in the place with style To all the ladies in the place with style and grace allow me to lace these
0:26.4	lyrical dushes in your bushet who rock grooves and make moves with all the mommy
0:31.0	The back of the club sipping my way is where you find me the back of the club macking holes my
0:36.0	crew's behind me mad question asking blunt passing music lasting but i just can't quit because one of these homies big he got to creep with sleep with keep the epic secret why not
0:48.0	hello and welcome to the great albums podcast i'm bill and i'm b. And Brian, what were we just listening to right there?
0:56.1	We're listening to Big Papa by Notorious.
1:01.5	Notorious B-I-I- Sorry, I can't.
1:04.8	By Notorious B-I-G from his 1994 album, Ready to Die.
1:14.7	Because what we do here every week on The Great Albums podcast is take a different album
1:19.1	of music and talk about what makes it great.
1:22.3	We are going to do a little bit of talking about our personal connections with the music,
1:26.6	and then we are going to talk a little bit about the history of personal connections with the music. And then we are going to
1:28.2	talk a little bit about the history of the artist and what went into the production of this
1:32.3	album before we get to a track-by-track review. Sounds good to me, man. Let's do it. All right. But we're
1:38.7	not going to do this alone, Brian. Oh, no? No, thanks to... Because I don't see anybody in the room.
1:45.3	You don't see anybody in the room because we are all on Skype right now.
1:49.1	Yeah, yeah, we're broadcasting via satellite.
1:52.5	This is the first time we've done this where even Brian and I are both in different locations.
1:57.0	I kind of miss you, dude.
1:58.2	Yeah, I don't know what to look at right now.
2:03.5	I'm just looking at waveforms on a screen instead of you.
	...

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