-- David Cantwell
The Notorious B.I.G.
Life After Death
Bad Boy Entertainment
Here we go again. Another dead rap icon. Another unintentionally posthumous album. Another hodgepodge of hip-hop mumbo jumbo that should've been left in the vaults. This time, it's Christopher Wallace, a.k.a. the Artist Formerly Known As the Notorious B.I.G., and his double-decker final CD Life After Death.
Wallace's first album, Ready to Die, hipped listeners to the East Coast swing of things with its tales of urban paranoia and a Bacchanalian ghetto lifestyle. Ready to Die was a textured spin on the West Coast shooting-smoking-screwing formula. But Life After Death, as a whole, is conceptually perplexing; it doesn't really know what it wants to be. It has two personalities -- one gloomy and foreboding, the other upbeat and fun-loving -- and neither, it seems, has any real relation to the other.
You could say that Wallace tried to go for the same uninhibited flow his deceased enemy, Tupac Shakur, went for on All Eyez on Me. In Life After Death's first disc (the fun half), Wallace revels in the sort of party-boy rogue abandon Shakur was famous for right up until his death. Wallace relishes his balls-out mackdaddy role on "Hypnotize," "#!*@ You Tonight" (with R. Kelly) and the frenetically madcap "Mo Money Mo Problems."
But a sense of confusion looms out of the nooks and crannies of the second disc (the creepy half). Most of the tunes don't extend or even measure up to Wallace's lip-smacking verbal wordplay. And the fact that the person performing these songs happens to be dead makes them perfect for those seeking postmortem memorandums. In "Going Back to Cali" (no relation to the LL Cool J hit of the same name), Wallace gives off an inadvertently sarcastic vibe toward California, where the rap community largely despised him and which became the site of his murder (he ends the song by saying that it's "a great place to visit"). And you can only guess what theories on the man's death will come out of his already-infamous closer, "You're Nobody ('Til Somebody Kills You)."
Ultimately, the CD is done in by too many producers, too many guest stars and unnecessary throaty chirps from professional coattail-rider Sean "Puffy" Combs that almost drown out Wallace himself. Just as Shakur's meandering Makaveli proved that a deceased rapper is often better than his postmortem CD, the Notorious B.I.G.'s Life After Death likely won't go down as the last worthy thing he recorded before leaving this planet. That honor goes to his debut. (The fun half, *** 1/2; the creepy half, * 1/2)
-- Craig D. Lindsey
CDs rated on a one to five star scale.
