4 Hour Tribute to the Notorious B.I.G.

October 6, 2008 10:00 AM

On the 10 year anniversary of his death, Mr. Cee of New York's Hot 97 played a 4-hour tribute mix (with some interviews and such) dedicated to the Notorious B.I.G., a/k/a Biggie Smalls a/k/a Big Poppa a/k/a Christopher George Latore Wallace. Downloads in four parts available here.

It takes a minute to get going, and, of course, it has all the usual Hot 97 bluster, but there's a lot of concentrated B.I.G. goodness as well, including some things that even you haven't heard before.

posted by kosem (20 comments total)

Yes! Thanks!.. I heard about it but I missed it so I'm glad to find it here!
posted by pez_LPhiE at 10:06 AM on October 6, 2008

(A minor clarification: both the anniversary and this mix happened a little while ago, i.e.., on March 9, 2007, so this is not a 10 year anniversary commemoration of Biggie thread. Juan Epstein just posted it a couple of days ago. It's dope and I thought I'd share.)
posted by kosem at 10:08 AM on October 6, 2008

I hope you're listenin'
smackin' babies at they christenin'
posted by Damn That Television at 10:23 AM on October 6, 2008

On the 10 year anniversary of his death, Mr. Cee of New York's Hot 97 played a 4-hour tribute mix

Miraculous!
posted by dersins at 10:44 AM on October 6, 2008 [3 favorites]

Notorious:The Movie I really hope this isn't too terrible.
posted by billyfleetwood at 10:45 AM on October 6, 2008

Miraculous!

I sort of saw that developing. Shamefully, I did nothing to stop it.
posted by kosem at 11:06 AM on October 6, 2008

It's really kind of amazing how strongly the death of Biggie has stayed with some people. Two years ago my then-girlfriend and I were attending a party at the Petersen Automotive Museum. When the ex told her mother that we were going there, she received the following warning:

"Be careful; that's were they did Big."

I thought that she had to for sure be joking. The likelihood that Biggie's assassins were still hanging out at the scene of the crime, eight years later, waiting to gun down anyone whose resemblance to their first victim extended exactly as far as an approximation of skin color, seemed extremely remote to me.

It turns out that she was not joking. She was serious, and felt a degree of anxiety about it. While I thought that she must be the only person to whom the thought would have occurred, about half the times that I've tried to relate the story to someone I've been interrupted by the question "Did she say something about Biggie?".
posted by Parasite Unseen at 11:21 AM on October 6, 2008 [1 favorite]

Word to mother, I`m dangerous,
Crazier than a bag of fucking Angel Dust!
posted by The Straightener at 11:54 AM on October 6, 2008

Christopher George Latore Wallace
posted by jbiz at 12:10 PM on October 6, 2008

Oh, and thanks for sharing :)
posted by jbiz at 12:11 PM on October 6, 2008

Christopher George Latore Wallace

Oy! Today is not my day. I completely shat the factchecking and proofreading bed. Thank you for fixing my substantive error.
posted by kosem at 12:16 PM on October 6, 2008

You know, I wasn't feelin big for the longest. Good post. If you dig around, there's also a release of original versions of a bunch of his songs. It came out (appeared) around August 1st or so, if I remember correctly.
posted by cashman at 1:29 PM on October 6, 2008

miss him miss him miss him.

this song used to make me cry...
posted by artof.mulata at 2:26 PM on October 6, 2008

Does this mix have all the radio ads and bumps in it?
posted by cell divide at 3:00 PM on October 6, 2008

> this song used to make me cry...

"When I met you I admit my first thoughts was to trick
You look so good huh, I suck on your daddy's dick (yeah)
I never felt that way in my life
It didn't take long before I made you my wife (uh, yeah)

[Girl]
Let me tell you nigga, if I ever, ever catch your ass fuckin around
I'ma cut your mother-fuckin dick off
[Puff Daddy]
Hah, heheh stop playin, hah
[Girl]
I ain't playin, ain't no jokes, ain't no jokes
Ain't no jokes
[Puff Daddy]
Yo, don't don't play with my dick"

Yeah, man...that's fuckin' beautiful. If only I'd known that tune before I chose a first dance at my wedding.
posted by you just lost the game at 3:37 PM on October 6, 2008

Yes. So wonderful and life-affirming...

Thanks for posting, yjltg ((sniff))...
posted by Zambrano at 4:31 PM on October 6, 2008

Ready to Die is easily the best gangsta rap album ever, hell I'd say it's better than any Scorsese flick as an artistic examination of the criminal mind. It's just so dark and complex. Even party songs like Juicy, come off as mere self delusional distractions from the psychological toll the gangsta life takes when taken in context of the whole album. And Suicidal Thoughts is definitely one of the best suicide songs ever written, way better than any angsty shit put out by Marilyn Manson or any other goth rockers.
posted by afu at 6:59 PM on October 6, 2008

Yeah, Suicidal Thoughts is pretty good, once you get past fucking Puff Daddy. What is going on with that, by the way? Every fucking "cameo" he slips in is toxic to the point of ruining whatever song it's in...at it's best, it's merely intrusive and confusing, like in 'Suicidal Thoughts' or 'Me and my Bitch.' At it's worst, it just sounds like some guy just wandered in off the street and tried to just jam with whatever was going on, and for some reason they used that take. Like, in 'Juicy,' the 'awwww yeah, it's all good, it's aaaaallll good' bullshit that just runs in the background, completely oblivious to the beat or whatever else is going on in the song.

I don't know why, but this is just one of the things that pisses me off most in music, and I had to vent about it.
posted by Tiresias at 9:36 AM on October 7, 2008

"Without sayin the producer's name all over the track. Yeah I said it!
Whatcha need to do is get back - to readin credits.
We the Medics
Alphabetically stuck on that A grade shit
now quit now
before we pour
that sure shot pure
rock co kane flow"
posted by cashman at 10:18 AM on October 7, 2008

I've now listened to the whole thing at least once forward to back and skipped around a few times. Like cashman, I was never that high on BIG, partly because the misogyny is real (the beatings are well documented) which in a completely indefensible way bothers me more than misogyny as a gangster conceit, and partly because I more or less stopped listening to the crime genre altogether (save Illmatic and Liquid Swords) for about five or six years. During that time, I forgot how great an MC he was.

Listening to him now, I remember why he's so compelling, and why at least Ready to Die is in the canon--without regard to BIG's beatification. Part of it, surely, is what afu touches on above. There is a deeply felt urgency--a paranoia, really--to his flow that is absolutely riveting. I think that this comes from a rare talent in MCs--what I fuzzily understand to be pitch and musicality. Very few MCs--the GZA, Mos Def and Phonte from Little Brother come to mind, are so locked down not only with the beat, but with the role of their voice in the track overall.
posted by kosem at 1:45 PM on October 7, 2008 [1 favorite]