Notorious B.i.g. - Life After Death
MusicMash Rating: not rated yet
Rolling Stone Rating: 3.5
The tragedy and the eulogy: There is a chilly prescience to the title, artwork and all-over vibe of the Notorious B.I.G.'s unintended swan song -- the cover photo shows the corpulent Biggie Smalls getting edged out of his own picture by a hearse-- until you think about how images and prophecies of death virtually define hip-hop. The cult of the warrior MC and the myth of a player's life were, from the very birth of rap culture, metaphors for escape from the vicious cycle of birth, struggle and extinguished spirit in urban black America. All that gold didn't make you bulletproof, either. "Life After Death," for all of its apparent foreboding ("Niggas Bleed," "Last Day," "You're Nobody [Til Somebody Kills You]"), is a record about the facts of life, gangsta style, rendered by Biggie in that thick, jaunty grumble. It would be mean-spirited to suggest that like most rap double-CD sets, this one is at least half a disc too much; the whiff of recycling in some of the jams and...
Read the complete review here