Take your pick from the Sylvia Striplin-sampling original, or the remix based on Dennis Edwards’ Don’t Look Any Further, it’s all about the sparring between Biggie and Lil’ Kim, who trade different verses on each version. Junior Mafia – Get Money (feat the Notorious BIG) (1996) Note the original lyrical twists – no how’s-your-father until Biggie has had his dinner! – and period detail: a pre-Auto-Tune, wildly off-key vocal on the hook. Craig Mack’s debut album was duly eclipsed by the release of Ready to Die a week beforehand.īy most accounts, the making of Biggie’s debut album was a struggle between the rapper’s street instincts and Sean “Puffy” Combs’s commerciality. Craig Mack – Flava in Ya Ear (remix feat Notorious BIG, LL Cool J, Rampage & Busta Rhymes) (1994)īoth an incredible single and an object lesson in the perils of getting Biggie Smalls to guest on your track despite the stellar company, his verse turns the song into his show. Posthumously, it sounded like a self-penned eulogy, complete with epitaph: “Live the phrase ‘Sky’s the limit’”.
One of several tracks that took on a different hue after Biggie’s death in 1997, aged 24, Sky’s the Limit was initially Life After Death’s equivalent of his breakthrough hit Juicy, an alternately wistful and dark account of his rise. The rapper elects to lie in wait: needless to say, it doesn’t end well for his would-be assailants. song ‘Ten Crack Commandments’.A beautifully concise bit of storytelling, complete with an impressively naturalistic conversational interlude during which Biggie, in character as a friend, informs himself that someone has taken a hit out on him. Biggie’s widow Faith Evans produced her own version of the song titled ‘Ten Wife Commandments’ while Lin-Manuel Miranda also paid homage to the song in his hit Broadway show Hamilton! with his ‘Ten Duel Commandments’. It has seen some memorable makeovers too. The song will go down in history as one of the seminal tracks of the 1990s. He helped hip hop break away from its formulaic recipe and bring the genre to fresh, uncharted territory. There’s no chorus on the track, and neither does Biggie abide by the 16-bar verse rule. What’s most interesting about the track isn’t the beats or the lyrics but how far Biggie Smalls experiments with precisely what a rap song can be.
The article was enough fuel to throw on Biggie’s fire, and the rapper ran with the idea. The article was published in 1994 under the title ‘On the Rocks: From 1984 to 1994, Ten Years of Crack’ and included a note which provided ‘A Crack Dealer’s Ten Crack Commandments’, delivering a see of rules for all dealers to live by. After reading a survival guide to survive as a crack dealer in The Source magazine, Smalls decided to re-interpret that article and ‘Ten Crack Commandments’ was the splendid result. New York was in the midst of a crack epidemic, and it had swirled into a new decade to grab a new generation b the scruff of the neck and to drown them in addiction. In truth, this track is an example of Biggie’s prowess at telling stories from a human perspective, even if the protagonist is questionable. Not because it made light of the epidemic of crack that had swept through America in the 1980s to such devastating results, but because it showcased the life Big had been forced to lead. One of the final tracks Big recorded for Life After Death the song has gone down in history as one of his greats. One such track is the brutal yet brilliant ‘Ten Crack Commandments’.
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