Ready to Die by The Notorious B.I.G. (1994), № 49 in The Lead-In’s 100 greatest albums. Forty-nine for Ready to Die is the kind of placement that gets an email from someone's older brother. We've read the email. We stand by forty-nine.
The Notorious B.I.G.'s debut. Released September 13, 1994. The album that established East Coast hip-hop's storytelling tradition for the 1990s.
Christopher Wallace's debut album. Released six months after Nas's Illmatic. The album that established Bad Boy Records and made Wallace the dominant East Coast rapper of the mid-1990s.
Christopher Wallace was 22 when Ready to Die was released. He had been signed to Sean Combs's new Bad Boy Records imprint in 1992. The album was recorded at multiple New York studios across 1993-1994 with a rotating cast of producers under Combs's executive direction.
The album's signature is Wallace's storytelling, the cinematic narrative approach that paralleled Nas's. The two debut albums together defined East Coast hip-hop's mid-1990s peak.
The album's 17 tracks include 'Things Done Changed,' 'Gimme the Loot,' 'Juicy,' 'The What' (featuring Method Man), 'Big Poppa,' 'Warning,' 'Ready to Die,' 'One More Chance,' 'Suicidal Thoughts.'
Ready to Die belongs at number forty-nine because it is the album that established the East Coast hip-hop storytelling tradition's commercial peak. Wallace was murdered in March 1997 at age 24.
The 1994 US original is on Bad Boy Records, distributed by Arista; the vinyl-specific number is 78612-73000-1 (the bare 78612-73000 is the release ID, with -2 the CD and -4 the cassette). Note there were two 1994 vinyl issues: a single-disc abridged LP under that number, and a separate double-LP that carried 'Who Shot Ya?' as a bonus — so the complete album on wax was the 2-LP. The cover is the afro'd infant resembling Biggie. Vinyl was a small run in a CD-dominated era, making clean 1994 originals genuinely scarce.
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