Biggie Smalls is the illest, truer words couldn’t have been spoken. Frank White aka The King Of New York aka Christopher Wallace aka Biggie Smalls aka The Notorious B.I.G was at the top of the game and at the top of his game when he was killed. In my personal opinion the death of Biggie is the saddest passing in the music since Jimi Hendrix. As great as Biggie was we still have no idea if he reached his full potential or not. That question alone becomes conflicting when people say Biggie is the greatest or even a top 5 emcee all-time. Being The Greatest at anything is a marathon not a sprint. There is no doubt in my mind that if Biggie would have lived and continued on the path that he was on he would have been in the conversation of being THE GREATEST. But with two studio albums in Biggie’s catalog it’s a hard argument to make.
Longevity gives you the ability to measure consistency over a long period of time. It allows us to be able to see how an emcee would adjust to the changing of times and new heavy hitters jumping in the game. How would Biggie have responded to the rise of The South? How would Biggie’s projects match up with new Hip-Hop acts like DMX, Big Pun, Mos Def, Eminem, 50 Cent, Kanye West, etc that were droppin heat and changing the game? Would Biggie have continued to dominate Jay Z & Nas? Would Biggie have continued to dominate radio without completely changing his sound to what radio was turning into? With all that being said I personally believe Biggie is a top 10 emcee all-time. You may have some people from a younger generation that think Biggie is overrated. Those individuals will understand better when they get older. When you look at Biggie’s professional career we are literally talking about 4 years worth of work. This is like 4 years of High School, 4 years without living all the way through your senior year. It does help that Biggie’s sophomore album was a classic double disc album. For an artist with only two studio albums in his catalog it doesn’t feel like we have a shortage of Biggie material. That’s because Biggie’s two albums are so jammed packed with classic material. Even the Junior Mafia album gave us a couple of classic joints thanks to Biggie’s guest appearance. Biggie made the best of cameos, he was a frequent collaborator and every last one of his collaborations was memorable from Total to Da Brat to Tracy Lee to Shaq to Jay Z. From a skill set standpoint Biggie may be the most all around talented emcee that we’ve ever seen on the mic. He had so many dimensions during a time period where emcees weren’t expected to have all of those dimensions. Biggie could kill you on the hardcore side of things, he could get you on the storytelling side of things, he could kill you with chart topping hit records, he could rhyme over basically anything and it sounded right. He had the voice, the lyrical skill, just the overall rhyming talent. Biggie used his voice as the perfect instrument, which is one reason that I believe he would have had no problem transitioning into the different eras of Hip-Hop.
There seem to be only two knocks on Biggie and that’s his amount of work and that he didn’t have as much lyrical content as Pac. In Biggie’s defense 2Pac had much more work and much more time to grow as an artist. Not to mention the fact that 2Pac’s upbringing automatically made him much more socially aware. But Biggie gave us a glimpse into his ability to make heartfelt records with “Me & My Bi**h”, “Miss U”, & “Sky’s The Limit”. You could literally hear the growth in Biggie from his first album to second but both albums had the same great level of quality. One could only imagine how great Biggie’s third studio album would have been. Or maybe it wouldn’t have been great. That’s the problem we just don’t know. It’s amazing to me that Biggie has two studio albums in his career but he gets an extremely high spot on the greatest of all-time list and Kendrick Lamar has 5 excellent projects in his catalog and people still act like he’s a new artist. Nostalgia is a mutha, with all that aside I understand why Biggie is spoken so highly of.
Biggie brought New York back during a time when the West Coast had the rap game in a choke hold. Biggie set the Blueprint that Jay Z adopted to become the most successful Hip-Hop artist that the game had ever seen. Who knows what type of emcee that Jay Z would have been if BIG would have lived. It’s hard to believe that both of them would have been able to take on that lane and dominate together. Reasonable Doubt is the only Jay Z album we have while Biggie was living and it sounds much different than anything else in Jay Z’s catalog. Biggie was groundbreaking and with the genius of Diddy he successfully made the marriage of hardcore Hip-Hop unite with R&B. Many Hip-Hop heads don’t like that marriage but it changed both Hip-Hop and R&B music forever and gave Hip-Hop a place on urban radio. Let the Biggie tribute mixes begin, and trust me you won’t feel cheated from this artist with two albums because just about his whole catalog is top notch quality #RIPBiggie #Top10
