READY TO DIE
the notorious BIG
ABOUT
In 1994 Notorious B.I.G. released the album Ready to Die which to some is considered one of the best Rap albums of all time. The album tells the story of Christopher Wallace (aka Notorious BIG) and his life growing up on the streets of Brooklyn NY, the hardships he endured, and how he used rap as an outlet, ultimately leading to his fame. Containing a total of 19 songs, this album has undoubtedly had a profound impact on the rap industry. Our goal for this project was to get a better understanding of Biggie's artistic style by examining the different stylistic features and themes he utilizes throughout the album that help facilitate its narrative style. We used these findings to draw conclusions about Biggie's strategy as an an artist and how his legacy may have contributed to the state of the rap game today.
METHODOLOGY
To better understand the nuances in Biggie’s storytelling style, we first brainstormed what excatly we wanted to look for in his songs. We decided to markup the songs for structural elements, themes, and stylistic elements.
We first marked up the structural elements of the songs including: title, intro, verse, chorus, outro, features, adlibs, outro, features, adlibs, interludes, and artist. We selected these because these are the typical structural elements found in most songs. We used regex to remove the brackets from all the adlibs and wrapped them in adlib tags.
Any of you who are already familiar with Biggie's lyricism are probably aware of the common themes of money and drugs. Upon further analysis, we found additonal prevalent themes such as violence, home, reflection, family, sex, and relationships and decided those were worth marking up as well. After combing a bit more through the album, we found the most prominent stylistic techniques to be repetition, allusiion, colloquialism, repitition, onomatopoeia, dialogue, hyperbole. For instances of allusions and colloquialism we specified what was being alluded or referred to using attributes.
In our schema, for title and artist, we included attribute elements to further define these markups. For the title, we included a theme attribute which we defined by any of the themes we listed above. For the artist element, we included a name attribute that highlighted what artist was rapping/singing that line. This was an important attribute to incorporate because Biggie has many features on this album, and those features are a component of his artistic choices.
*Disclaimer* Song number 8, "Fuck Me (Interlude)" is included but is not marked up because we didn't feel it was substantial enough to mark up. But, for the sake of being able to view the albmum cohesively, we wanted to include it, unmarked, in the reading view.
FINDINGS
The theme that appears most in the album was sex and the theme that ocurred the least was home. This could be reflective of how Biggie may have prioritized having sex with women, as most young men tend to do in their 20s, or it could be a general reflection of trying to include popular topics other artists would commonly discuss in their music at the time in order to keep the album "relevant". Most male rappers at the time such as Tupac, NWA, and Run DMC were commonly heard rapping about sex. The other two most popular themes of violence and drugs could be a reflection of what Biggie experienced in his life as a hustler on the streets of New York. Considering his upbringing as well as his previous run ins with law enforcement, these themes could easily have been a part of Biggie's everyday life which may be why they occur so frequently throughout the album.
The most used stylistic techniques were allusions, colloquialism, and repitition. Seeing as this album was an overall narration of Biggie's life, it makes sense that he would use allusions to reference different aspects of his life throughout the album. Additionally, the use of colloquialism seems appropriate considering there was a lot of "illegal" aspects of Biggie's life that he referred to and may not have been able to refer to those things straight up. This is also demonstrative of Biggie's creativity as an artist as well as authenticity because of the fact that colloquial terms are considered "informal" or "untraditional" yet he still used them to tell his story. Some of the colloquial terms originated in New York so it also shows Biggie's connection to his home. Repitition could just come down to pure stylistic/structural decisions Biggie made but it could also show us the things Biggie may have wanted to put emphasis on.
ALL ABOUT BIGGIE
Christopher Wallace was born May 21, 1972 in Brooklyn New York. His mother, Voletta Wallace, raised him on her own; his father left them when Christopher was 2 years old. His mom worked two jobs with long hours to provide for them. Biggie began selling drugs at the age of 12 to help provide for him and his mom. Due to his mother's long hours, she had no idea what he was up to. At the age of 17, Christopher dropped out of high school and began pursuing street life, which included hustling drugs. After recieving 5 years of probabtion due to weapons possesion charges, then serving 9 months in prison for drug charges, Christopher decided to make a demo titled 'Let's Do It Againt' under the name 'Biggie Smalls'. The demo gained tremendous popularity, leading Biggie into the arms of producer Sean "Puffy" Combs aka Puff Daddy and his label Bad Boy Records in 1992. Fast forward to 1994 and we have the release of Biggies album 'Ready To Die'. This album was certified gold within two months, double-platinum the following year, and eventually quadruple-platinum. "Big Poppa," the second of the album's four singles, was nominated for a Grammy for best rap solo performance.
MEET THE TEAM
Mayah Mbangah
- She/Her
- Major(s): Linguistics; Communications
My favorite song on the album is Respect. In this song Biggie narrates the timeline of his life from birth to fame. My favorite verse is when he talks about him being in his mothers womb.
Rebecca Benjamin
- She/Her
- Major(s): Public Service
My favorite song on the album is Suicidal Thoughts. I felt like his narration was very powerful and I thought the phone call being written into the song was a very creative choice
Ranier Acierto
- He/Him
- Major(s): Computer Science; Information Science
My favorite song on the album is Warning. I thought the word choice and imagery in this song wac really vivid anf the story was very compelling learning about his experience with violence.
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