If nothing else, The King & I isn’t as cynical as the posthumous Notorious B.I.G. albums that came before it. Granted, that’s a low bar: 1999’s stingy Born Again stretched a hambone of unreleased material into an album’s worth of split-pea soup, while 2005’s Duets: The Final Chapter resorted to even more shameful recycling tactics. The world didn’t need another tour of rap’s emptiest vault, but at least this one’s guided by his widow, singer Faith Evans, whose intentions are ostensibly beyond reproach. Compared to its Diddy-helmed predecessors, The King & I oozes affection for its subject, celebrating him not as an icon or a cash cow, but as a loved one. Instead of packing the album with of-the-moment features designed to move units, Evans limits the guest list to Big’s pals and peers. No Korn collaborations here; this is a family tribute.
But good intentions aren’t enough to salvage bad ideas, and King & I commits to a truly awful one: an entire 72-minute album of duets between Evans and her long-dead husband, with barely a scrap of unheard audio to justify the endeavor. Never mind how distracting it is to hear some of these verses for a third time—and it’s never not distracting—the project was doomed from a purely technical level. Recording fidelity has evolved considerably in the 20 years since Biggie’s death, making it even harder than before to pass off his leftover audio scraps as new; it’s like trying to splice grainy ’80s VHS footage into an HD broadcast and hoping nobody notices. No matter how hard you squint, there’s never any illusion these two were in the same studio together. Even at its best, The King & I sounds like Evans is dueting with a Notorious B.I.G. soundboard app.
The King & I is simultaneously too stingy and too indiscriminate with its star attraction, denying fans new verses yet projecting his hologram raps over every song until the reflexive thrill of hearing one of rap’s greatest voices is extinguished. Each verse becomes a reminder of his absence—he’s never sounded more like a relic of the distant past than when “Tryna Get By” rehashes his 20-year-old “Sky’s the Limit” boast about owning a mobile phone. This is the last way anybody wants to remember him.
It’s doubly cruel that Evans committed so fully to the album’s misguided premise since, reused Biggie footage aside, this is some of her strongest work in years. Her voice has a lived grit and she radiates passion as she works through decades-old grief. She agonizes over the mystery of his murder on “Somebody Knows”—one of several sharp boom-bap/New Jack Swing throwbacks produced with Salaam Remi—then laments that her husband never had the chance to watch their son grow up on “One in the Same.” “I tried my best to explain/Why did you go/But the child don’t understand,” she sings, her voice flushed with anguish. Songs about Biggie’s death have become a kind of subgenre unto themselves, but few have felt this personal.
The muse is solid, and there’s something sweet about the idea that after all these years, Biggie still brings out the best in Evans. Now if only his reconstituted raps weren’t plastered over every inch of the record. Here’s a compromise that might have worked: a Biggie-inspired album, one that honors her late husband and maybe even samples him periodically, but frees itself from the burden of slotting his old recordings onto every song. Sometimes less is more, and that’s especially true when so little remains.
