Revisiting "Ready to Die": A Hip-Hop Classic

Before I jump right into Biggie I need to mention a few things. I just read a review, published in The Wall Street Journal, of the movie “Straight Outta Compton” titled “Gangsta Rap’s Grim Legacy For Comptons Everywhere”. The major complaint: the film’s positive treatment of the rap group NWA (did they really not see that coming?). According to the WSJ expert, the film has failed to take into account the “grim reality” that gangsta’ rap’s “glorified thuggery poisoned Black communities”. To them, NWA’s Hip-Hop was simply a platform with which to blast police officers (quite unfairly) and “glamorize” their criminal lifestyles. The critic goes on to criticize the protagonist's choice of clothing (they dress like ruffians), criminal activity and defiance of authority. It seems to me as if this reviewer might have missed the point- not just of “Straight Outta Compton” but of Hip-Hop in general.

However, this argument isn’t new. Critics of Hip-Hop, particularly the genre called “Gangsta Rap”, have long held that the music is downright dangerous and most certainly a trigger for bad behavior in impressionable young adolescents. I’ll admit, listening to Eminem in my youth did cause me to make some regrettable fashion choices (the sweatpants with one leg rolled up and the other rolled down- ugh), but I suspect their beef goes deeper than that. To the critics, “Gangsta Rap” is nothing but the mindless glorification of money, guns, drugs and sex. If that were the case then I would have to agree that very little positivity could come from such an artform. However, there are two (good to very good) reasons why I don’t hold this position. First, if I were to shun all media that appeared on the surface to glorify either money, sex or violence, that would mean I couldn’t watch such verified classics as Conan the Barbarian, Wolf of Wall Street or, hell, even Pokemon: The First Movie (you know, that flick where kids capture wild animals and make them battle each other to the point of unconsciousness). Secondly, it lumps the entire genre into a single category of acceptability without looking at each piece as an individual work by an individual author. I’m sorry, 50 Cent is not Nas and Chief Keef isn’t Tupac, despite the fact that I’ve bumped all of them, happily, at one point or another in my life.

If we can accept that gangsta’ rap doesn’t deserve a blanket judgment, we can also accept that an album centering on criminal activity and the associated lifestyle can be intelligent and thought-provoking or, in other words, can move beyond “glorified thuggery”. I can’t make the claim that every album in the genre does this, though I also instinctively know that many do. What exactly is it about these pieces of music that moves them from one level to the next? What transforms that which on the surface is an ode to criminal activity into something that may be useful to society or valued as a work of high art? It is with these questions swirling around beneath my nappy afro that, in the witching hours of the morning, I put on my headphones and revisited the first track of Notorious B.I.G.’s (or Biggie Smalls) aptly named first album, “Ready to Die” (perhaps the greatest gangster rap album of all time), on Spotify.

Like any good introduction, the first track is key to setting up the rest of the piece. “Back in the day!,” a booming voice sings in the chorus, “Things done changed on this side, remember they use to thump [fight]? But now they blast, right?” Transformation, in all its terrible reality, is the heart of this song. “Ready to Die” was released in 1994, as cities from LA to New York were still reeling from the devastation brought by the American crack epidemic of the eighties and early nineties. The flood of cheap narcotics brought with it an escalation in the severity of organized crime. As a result, firearms (and an increased death-toll) became a more prominent feature of the gang violence of poor communities, replacing the brawls of yesterday. Many Americans watched the change disinterestedly from the distance and safety of their television screens, but Biggie was there in the middle of it and entirely in danger. This reality is the basis of much of the fear and desperation which permeates the production from start to finish. Biggie’s, or the character of Biggie, responds to this new, omnipotent threat like any successful organism would: through adaptation, carrying and using a gun himself. The lyrics are infused with an awareness of the fleeting and fragile nature of the human life around him and are, I would argue, a lamentation on change. Verse 3:

“If I wasn’t in the rap game

I’d probably have a knee deep in the crack game,

because the streets is a short stop:

either you’re selling crack rock or you got a wicked jump shot.

Shit it’s hard being young from the slums,

eating five cent gums, not knowing where your meal’s coming from.

And now shit’s getting crazier and major-

kids younger than me, they got the Sky brand pagers,

going out of town, blowing up-

six months later all the dead bodies showing up.

It make me wanna grab the 9 and the shotty,

but I gotta go identify the body.

Damn what happened to the summertime cookouts?

Every time I turn around a nigga gettin took out.

Shit, my momma got cancer in her breast,

don’t ask me why I’m motherfuckin stressed-

things done changed.

Back in the day-

things done changed on this side:

remember they used to thump?

But now they blast, right?”

This is the crack epidemic verbalized. Within these seventeen lines are encapsulated the feelings of futility, hunger and desperation which the state of poverty engenders. If we were to take a hard look at this and the other, similar, verses throughout the album we might come closer to understanding the psychology of those vulnerable to the temptations of crime. For now though it is enough to take away the fact that twin stresses of hunger and violence permeate all of Biggie’s life.

The next track dives further into the possibilities of the narrative mode, with Biggie manipulating his voice to play two different characters committing a burglary together and engaging in dialogue. The somber tone is gone and we’re left with a song laced with anger and aggression:

“Man niggas come through I’m taking high school rings too;

bitches get strangled for their earrings and bangles-

and when I rock her and drop her, I’m taking her door knockers,

and if she’s resistant: blakka, blakka, blakka…”

We have moved away from self-defense into a much more active form of criminal activity and, clearly, Biggie is not painting the prettiest picture of himself. Yet we are still repeatedly reminded of the context:

“Motherfucking right, my pockets looking kinda tight,

and I’m stressed, yo Biggie let me grab the vest...”

“Cause mom dukes ain’t giving me shit-

so for the bread and butter I leave niggas in the gutter...”

In this way, the second track develops the themes of desperation introduced in the first. Biggie is most certainly not “ballin”. He’s broke. Which means he’s hungry, literally, and he’s taking your earrings and flipping them for a good meal. There is a definite theme of amorality here, but it is important to understand its origin. Our narrator’s fuel is not sadism, it’s starvation, and what adds depth to Biggie’s character (and perhaps makes him an anti-hero) is that his anti-social choices are directly related and proportionate to the stresses of poverty (and institutional racism, a whole different topic) he is subjected to. The narrative ends on a cliffhanger in which Biggie and his comrade brace themselves for an altercation with the cops:

“So lace up your boots,

‘cause I’m about to shoot,

a true motherfucker going out for the loot!”

Note the last line is actually a prediction of his own death, far from promising a happy ending to his criminal shopping spree- if one was possible anyway.

Looking at the song as a whole, Biggie’s complete lack of concern for social norms and morals, set to tight rhyme schemes, might come off as clever and subversive in the same sense that Eminem did in his earliest work. However, the more important take-away here is that Biggie is not some pop-icon or clean-cut hero. The song is about ruthlessness and desperation. It’s an ugly story because that’s how it’s supposed to be. Being a low-level criminal, trying to make ends meet, is an inherently ugly state of existence. The successful, living in luxury “crime boss” of the modern radio is not here. All that can be seen is a desperate man with a gun.

On “Ready to Die” (the track, not the album), Biggie spits:

“Fuck the world, my mom’s and my girl;

my life is played out like a Jheri curl,

I’m ready to die.”

There’s also the song “Everyday Struggle,” which has for its chorus:

“I don’t wanna live no more,

sometimes I hear death knocking at my front door-

I’m living every day like a hustle,

another drug to juggle, another day, another struggle.”

There’s a recurring theme here of weariness. In a sense, being “ready to die” is about being tired. It implies that life in a certain state has become unbearable to the point where change or self-annihilation are the only two options. It is this darkness which powers B.I.G.’s fury and gives his reckless courage potency.

The album isn’t, of course, all gloom and anger. To say such would be doing it a disservice. There are high points where the mood is celebratory and playful. These include the radio singles you’ve probably heard even if you aren’t a Hip-Hop fan: “Juicy”, “One More Time” and “Big Poppa”. “Juicy” in particular is a celebration of his major success in the rap-game. These sort of tracks are essential in their own right, they give Biggie’s character different dimensions. He is a at times a playful figure, interested mostly in partying and sex, fully capable of enjoying life when given the opportunity. His character is not some nihilistic loner cut off from the happiness to be found in the present; his suffering is a result of a complex set of factors that may interact with his own personality but aren’t inherent within it.

It is in fact the suffocating nature of these factors, which squeeze the playfulness out of life and turn it into something gray and dark, that oppresses his spirit and causes the overall mood of “Ready to Die” to be of angst. Biggie has beef with life, which has forced him into a petty criminal existence marked by violence and has turned him, like an inner-city wolfman, into something which is inherently painful. There is an exhilaration in criminal activity and violence as it imbues one with a feeling of power, an emotion that those in a society that promotes powerlessness (of certain demographics) may crave. Yet that exhilaration always occurs within a greater context of depression. Even despite the emotional highs, his last track, “Suicidal Thoughts”, is a tribute to the re-emergence and eventual inner domination of his damaged psyche. The final, tragic sound of gunshots proves Biggie can escape anything except for his own, scarred self.

As the concluding song finished playing, I realized that the primary achievement of “Ready to Die” may be its ability to flesh out a human being we can relate to, who we can feel joy and pain with. Biggie is not a monster in the form of a human being, he is a human being compelled into a life some might call “monstrous”. A transformation brought about not by his own choice but by the inexplicable movements of life itself. This artistic attempt would have failed quite miserably, of course, if Biggie hadn’t been a master storyteller. As of yet I have only discussed content and theme but it is equally important to touch on the Notorious B.I.G.’s incredible skill as a wordsmith.

Hip-Hop is a polyamorous marriage between music, storytelling and poetry; it is a modern bardic (or for a more Afrocentric term, ”griot”) tradition. Good Hip-Hop should bring you the benefits of all these genres. It should suck you in through its musical quality, through its narrative power and through its poetic ability. Through poetry it should have the ability to showcase the aesthetic possibilities of the English language and breathe new life and understanding into images and scenes both familiar and strange. By its narrative power one should find the characters and plots it creates believable, relatable and intensely interesting. It is through Biggie’s mastery of these elements that he is able to make the aforementioned themes come alive. They grab you and pull you into their world and, through the simple honesty and emotional power of his words, we may relate to a character who in real life we would have found reprehensible. He gets us to put our guard down, and that is an amazing thing.

This then, we could say is one of the sources of value in good Hip-Hop, perhaps especially gangsta-rap: it creates empathy. It takes people who may ordinarily be incomprehensible and makes plain their motivations, desires, fears and heartaches. Paradoxically, despite its ruggedness and its bad attitude it has a humanizing effect. In my opinion, “Ready to Die” is the epitome of this phenomenon in the genre. From an artistic standpoint, it is hard to argue his work has any less merit than that of the more “conscious” rappers like Tupac or Lupe Fiasco- it is merely that they “tell” what he “shows”.

Further, through our empathy the hypocrisy of being a middle-class rap fan is made apparent: the life of Biggie’s character is exciting, romantic and, in the end, entirely undesirable. We are locked in a tug of war between envy and sympathy that, eventually, ends in the latter- though we will keep going back to the earlier tracks that made us feel strong and empowered. We become aware, through listening to the music, of our own subversive desires, frustrations with the “system” and, if you’re like me, the privilege of living out this life as a fantasy and not a reality. It is this creation of empathy, along with the sheer beauty of the words, that moves this album from beyond the category of mindless pop-culture into the realm of true, meaningful art.

All this isn’t to say Hip-Hop can’t be dangerous. My ability to understand Notorious B.I.G. this way is based on my relative maturity, psychological well-being and generally stable environment; not everyone is lucky enough to possess all that. But all violent media shares this property; to the properly troubled mind the “Rambo” movies and “the Godfather” could prove as well to be disastrous. For an adolescent trapped in the grip of systematic poverty, who has already lost faith in his educational system or in our nation’s generally empty rhetoric of freedom and equality, Biggie may very well be something different. Biggie may be the voice that soothes his or her damaged psyche as they too struggle and live a life that we would shun, whispering to them through their headphones that: “I’ve walked this hell too.” Hopefully the concluding gunshots don’t fail to deliver their message. I would argue that in this case, though, presenting music as the primary cause of adolescent misbehavior is disingenuous. Rather, instead of questioning whether or not to censor controversial art, we should be tackling the issues of social, political and economic inequality that gave birth to said art in the first place. After all, middle-class White children are listening to more Hip-Hop than ever, yet we are not seeing a spike in gang membership or prison records in well-off suburbs; there are bigger factors than pop culture at play. Biggie’s character in “Ready to Die” didn’t need to cite popular music as a motivation for his criminality. The constant hunger, fear and psychological weariness was enough. I suspect the same is true for the many young men and women who walk the streets today.

We must never forget the roots of this music. True, “gangsta’ rap’s” surprising popularity has turned much of contemporary music into mere pop. True, much of what today passess for “Hip-Hop” is watered down, corporate garbage unfairly shoved down our and our children’s ears. True, there will always be thoughtless, mindless versions of any artform. But some real Hip-Hop artists, even those who foray into the territory of “gangsta”, still exist. Danny Brown, Schoolboy Q and Jay Rock are all prime examples. Their albums aren’t meant to be listened to and simply put down and forgotten. That percentage of Hip-Hop, whatever it is, that is still real is screaming in our faces to be heard, so that its words will not be forgotten. It is shouting in anger so that we won’t fail to hear it and look at it deeply and see our reflections mirrored in its characters and stories. In this day and age especially we may find that real Hip-Hop is essential in seeing ourselves in one another. This may involve dealing with and dismantling our own prejudices and old ways of thinking, but if we can then we may be open to new levels of understanding.