The lawlessness it describes-robberies at gunpoint on the A train, open-air hand-to-hand crack deals on Fulton St., shootouts with the NYPD-land unfathomably to most New Yorkers today. But the shift has fossilized a certain kind of rap album, like The Notorious B.I.G.’s debut Ready to Die, released in 1994. This is undoubtedly a good thing-entrepreneurial city teens today hustle fashion trends to ogling editors instead of baggies to scraggly addicts.
Sure, there are bike messengers that peddle weed packed in plastic jars and Russian mobsters who launder money through Coney Island auto-shops, but the kind of trap-house, dope-boy, Robin Hood archetype that still carries in cities like Atlanta has been wiped clean from tri-state folklore. In The Source magazine’s October 1994 issue, Ready to Die was given a rating of 4½ mics out of five.New York City doesn’t sell drugs anymore. The record was certified gold by the RIAA two months after its release, and went double platinum in 1995. The album also made Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, landing at #133. “Big Poppa” was nominated for “Best Rap Solo Performance” at the 39th Annual Grammy Awards, losing out to LL Cool J’s “Hey Lover”-but it earned a Billboard Music Award later that year. According to several sources, he recorded the latter half by freestyling from memory. Biggie resumed production the following year under the auspices of the newly-founded Bad Boy Records. After Puffy was fired from Uptown Records in 1993, the project was only half finished.
Production of the album took place in two waves. The project is Biggie’s only album to be released during his lifetime his sophomore project, Life After Death, dropped just days after his murder in March 1997. It was also Bad Boy Records' first release, produced by founder Sean “Puffy” Combs.
Ready to Die, The Notorious B.I.G.’s debut studio album, was released on September 13, 1994.
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