The Notorious B.I.G.: The Greatest Storyteller in Rap

Some rappers are faster, some are louder, some sell more records. Almost none could do what Christopher Wallace did with a microphone: make you see it. The Notorious B.I.G. — Biggie Smalls — had a flow so smooth and a sense of detail so cinematic that his verses played like short films, every character and corner of Brooklyn rendered in a few unhurried bars. He released one album in his lifetime and a second two weeks after his murder, and on the strength of barely two records he is still, decades later, near the top of almost every list of the greatest to ever do it.

Bedford-Stuyvesant

He was born Christopher George Latore Wallace on 21 May 1972 and grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighbourhood of Brooklyn. He was a gifted student as a boy and a hustler as a teenager, and both halves fed the music: the sharp mind that could build an airtight narrative, and the firsthand knowledge of the streets he narrated. He rapped on the corners, made a demo, and was discovered by a young Sean "Puffy" Combs, who signed him to the new label Bad Boy Records.

Ready to Die

In 1994 Biggie released Ready to Die, one of the most acclaimed debut albums in hip-hop history. It moved from the joyous rags-to-riches anthem Juicy to the smooth swagger of Big Poppa to the genuinely harrowing — a record bookended by birth and suicide, funny and frightening in the same breath. Almost single-handedly, it pulled the spotlight of hip-hop back to New York, and made Biggie the king of the East Coast.

The Voice and the Flow

What made him singular was control. His voice was deep and unhurried, his timing impeccable; he could pack dense internal rhymes into a line and make it sound like casual conversation. He rarely wrote his lyrics down, composing and memorising entire songs in his head. Other rappers marvelled at it then and study it now. He made hard things sound easy, which is the rarest gift there is.

The Feud

Biggie's rise coincided with the era's defining and ultimately fatal conflict: the East Coast–West Coast rivalry, with Bad Boy and Biggie on one side and Death Row and Tupac on the other. Once close, the two men became symbols of a war stoked by media and labels, and it spiralled, with devastating speed, from records into real violence.

Life After Death

Six months after Tupac was murdered in Las Vegas, Biggie was shot and killed in a drive-by in Los Angeles on 9 March 1997. He was twenty-four. His second album, the double-length Life After Death — containing Hypnotize, Mo Money Mo Problems and Sky's the Limit — was released just two weeks later and went on to sell in the tens of millions. Like Tupac's, his murder has never been solved.

The Legacy

On the strength of two albums, Biggie reshaped rap's centre of gravity, set a standard for storytelling and flow that has never been bettered, and became the template for a generation of New York MCs. The aspiration baked into songs like Sky's the Limit — the dream of getting out, getting up, getting more — became one of hip-hop's enduring themes. Brooklyn still claims him as its own.

Biggie at Skeleton House

On Dead Reckoning it is Biggie who raps — Sky's the Limit — this time for Aaliyah, another young New York star taken far too soon. Borrowing the title of one of his most hopeful songs, it turns aspiration into elegy: the great storyteller telling one last story for someone who never got to finish hers. You can read about his rival and brother-in-arms in our Tupac Shakur tribute, and more on the album in the Dead Reckoning concept and announcement.

Watch the Dead Reckoning visual album →

Two albums. That was all it took. The sky, it turned out, really was the limit.