Ready to Die turns 20 on Saturday, and even at a moment when hip-hop is particularly taken with such milestones, this is (fittingly) an enormous one. It’s sad, funny, bleak, brilliant, and then it’s over, and all that’s left is to play the whole thing again.
But soon we have dark humor (“it don’t make sense going to heaven with the goodie-goodies / Dressed in white, I like black Timbs, and black hoodies”), deathbed sexual boasting (“My baby momma kissed me but she’s glad I’m gone / She knows me and her sister had something going on”), and cultish, kitschy references to New Jack City and Beat Street. Coming at the end of an album obsessed with death and all varieties of moral transgression, the opening lines-“when I die, fuck it I wanna go to hell / cause I’m a piece of shit it ain’t hard to fuckin’ tell”-seem to herald the most depressing piece of music in human history. “ Suicidal Thoughts,” the closing track of the Notorious B.I.G.’s towering debut album, Ready to Die, is two minutes of rhymed confession that culminates in a self-inflicted gunshot. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Thelma & Louise-but it takes particular audacity to end with a suicide note. A lot of great art ends with suicide- Anna Karenina, Sgt.
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