Ready to Die

Producer Easy Mo Bee used to drive Biggie around New York City in his Acura as a creative exercise. The two Brooklyn natives would take extended trips through all five boroughs, Biggie rapping in the passenger seat, ideas developing in motion. DJ Premier, who produced one of the album's tracks, later recalled that Biggie never wrote down a single word. He would make a show of needing pen and paper, but nothing ever got written. He kept the whole album in his head and delivered it in the booth.

Ready to Die was the first release on Sean Combs' Bad Boy Records, which had started with no track record and a twenty-two-year-old rapper from Brooklyn who had been dealing drugs and getting arrested. The album moves between two registers with complete confidence: the raw, street-level darkness of "Gimme the Loot" and "Things Done Changed," and the radio-friendly soul-sampling warmth of "Juicy" and "Big Poppa." Puff Daddy recognized fairly late in the process that they needed hits to balance the harder material, and the resulting tension between those two modes is what makes the album feel like a complete portrait rather than just a street record.

"Juicy" is one of the most purely pleasurable debut album openers in hip-hop history, a full-length autobiography about a kid from Bed-Stuy who used to read Word Up magazine, delivered over a Diana Ross sample. It was Biggie's way of introducing himself: here is who I was, here is who I am, here is why it matters. He was twenty-one when he recorded most of it. He was murdered in 1997, three years after it came out. This is the only studio album he completed while he was alive.