Born Again commences Biggie’s posthumous disemboweling. It’s the first project bearing his name that was conceived, produced, and completed after the Brooklyn icon had gasped his last breaths. By now, rap fans are deeply familiar with this baleful, unlovely creature—the posthumous collection of reworked demos, outtakes, and leftovers cobbled together by executives and hired guns, paired with a list of guest artists and of-the-moment producers. They reek of boardroom meetings. They usually fill you with a hollow, complicit feeling for even hitting “play.” It is hard to think of five such records in pop-music history that justify their existence after their first-week sales figures have posted.
In the two years since Biggie’s death, his mentor and corporate svengali Puff Daddy had already found several ingenious ways to siphon cash and attention from his dead protégé. Puffy's solo album, long in the works, was retitled No Way Out from working title Hell Up In Harlem and overhauled after Biggie’s death, emerging full of gothic dread and intimations of ready-to-die-ness. Its biggest single was his Police-sampling, “I’ll Fly Away”-interpolating “I’ll Be Missing You,” a maudlin tribute to The Notorious B.I.G. that spent 11 weeks at No. 1.
The following year, he released the debut album from The Lox, a hardheaded trio of Yonkers rappers with a deafening street buzz. Puff decked them in shiny suits and dropped them in front of Hype Williams’ fish-eye lens, where they looked about as comfortable as middle schoolers stranded at prom. The album included the less-heralded, equally maudlin tribute, “We’ll Always Love Big Poppa.” In the video, baby-faced Jadakiss, Sheek Louch, and Styles P poured their hearts out to their dead friend, while Puff Daddy stood behind them, pointing meaningfully at the camera. It was clear that whatever Puff thought of the grief process, he didn’t see much need to keep it behind closed doors.
Somewhere in there came the announcement for Born Again. Initial reports promised a sort of Biggie bildungsroman, pairing narration from Biggie’s mother Voletta Wallace with unheard demos and unreleased material. Rap listeners had been busily copping and sharing Biggie exclusives from a steady stream of mixtapes, freestyles and unfinished cuts dating back to 1993, but those traveled in rarefied circles, and the idea of a studio album bringing this stuff to the masses was enticing. But the story changed quickly, and often; a full-page ad in the September ‘99 issue of The Source promised some intrigue, including a track that would posthumously reunite Biggie and 2Pac and a new remix of “Party & Bullshit” that foretold an appearance from Will Smith. For better or for worse, this never came to pass, and what ended up being released was a jumble of some older, less well-known verses and some recycled material from already-available releases.
Born Again wasn’t Biggie’s story. Sure, it spawned one or two lasting cuts: the flashy, Duran Duran-sampling “Notorious B.I.G.” and the vicious early pre-Ready To Die demo “Dead Wrong.” But the real story it tells is about Puff Daddy—how he flailed into the spotlight after Big’s death, how he treated his protégé’s legacy. He immediately sought to cast himself as Biggie’s equal: You can see the video for “Victory” as a sort of prelude. Biggie’s verse play is just background music for shots of Puff Daddy running slow motion in front of explosions in the rain.
This is the kind of Biggie album Puff made without the stubborn, strong-willed Wallace present in the room to dig in his heels and say “no.” The production for the album makes no sense—it made no sense for a Biggie album in 1999, and it makes even less sense in 2017. The dank, chaotic original “Niggas” from 1993, produced by Mister Cee and gloriously scarred up with frenetic scratching, gets cleaned up and “updated” all the way to 1999, sounding tame and inert. The Timb-boot funk of that basement session evaporates completely, and the song loses all of its meaning transferred into major-label sunlight.
Similarly, it’s nice to think about Mannie Fresh and Biggie in the same room with Biggie alive—they were both inventive, antic minds that loved surprising word choices and unpredictable flows. But hearing Biggie’s second ferocious verse stripped from the original version of “Dead Wrong”—a song, remember, that appears elsewhere on this album—laid over Fresh’s bouncy instrumental “Hope You Niggas Sleep,” and followed by verses from all the members of Hot Boys and Big Tymers, only underscores how dead Wallace was.
His verse from “Dangerous MCs,” meanwhile, was meant to appear on a song from Busta Rhymes’ The Coming, produced by J Dilla. It was scrapped purportedly because of some veiled threats at 2Pac lurking in it and the album’s makers were leery of tossing any more powder into the keg. With them both dead, Big’s incendiary lines detonate harmlessly over an airless, functional beat from Nottz: “Catch my drift/Or catch my four-fifth lift/At least six inches above project fences/Turn meat to minces/Jumps turn to flinches/When I rain I drenches/Cleared your park benches.” Hearing one dead man launch subliminals at another dead one is perverse, particularly since the producers arranged some East Coast/West Coast unity kabuki elsewhere on the project, bringing Ice Cube to rap a verse on “If I Should Die Before I Wake” saluting Biggie as the “King of New York.”
Is any of it worth it? Tough to say. Without this album, you might have never heard “Relax and take notes while I take tokes of the marijuana smoke.” That’s a canonical line, and it introduces “Dead Wrong,” the only near-classic here. The original, produced by Easy Moe Bee, is a giggly and profane game of Dozens, Biggie indulging his filthy imagination for all its worth: broomsticks get used for unspeakable purposes and Lucifer is laughed out of the room. On the new version, the stakes are higher, and the music sharper, a sideways-jerking, always-falling-off-the-beat thing that samples the Rev. Al Green, of all people. He didn’t even fuck it up by including a new verse from a pissy white kid named Eminem on it, a rapper Big had never heard of who had mostly become famous at that point for making fun of his mom and boy bands. It all sounds a little tired in retrospect—“cannibals and exorcisms, animals havin' sex with 'em”—but at the time, it was a revelation.
The decision to bring Eminem in said a lot about Puffy’s shifting priorities. Mark Pitts, an executive producer on Born Again, likened the project to “building Frankenstein.” Even shortly after working on the project, he sounded queasy about it: “The only thing that bothered me was the [guests artists] on the album. He would’ve respected them all, but he wouldn’t have worked with them all. Just because they’re hot doesn’t mean they mesh.”
Soon, he would accompany artists he wouldn’t have even respected: Korn comes to mind. The trail of artists who can technically claim to have appeared alongside the Notorious B.I.G. has only grown more disheartening with time. “I did real songs with Big, no made-up shits,” Jadakiss sneered at 50 Cent in their 2006 battle. By then, having recorded a song next to Biggie Smalls was no longer rarefied air, and these were the first unreal songs with Big. In that sense, they inaugurated a long and sad tradition.
From Hendrix to Elvis to Nirvana, none of this death-industry stuff is new. But in hip-hop, a music tied so closely to the inhuman ravages of the drug war and the carceral state, the charge pulsed a little hotter. Nineties gangsta rap always smelled of sulfur, of various deals cut with sundry devils, and its most potent tracks gave those who confronted them a mortal thrill. Alive, Big could inhabit this archetype and artfully squirm out of it in the same line, and it only took his presence—no more, no less—to set this animation in motion. “Excuse me, flows just grow through me/Like trees to branches, cliffs to avalanches,” he deadpanned on a throwaway line from Ready To Die’s “The What.” You could lose an hour, or a year, thinking about the imagery there, plumbing the mind that casually bundled those two thoughts together. “We dress up like ladies and burn ‘em with dirty .380s,” he proposed on the Life After Death cut “Niggas Bleed.” These lines are well-worn by repetition that they should, by all rights, have lost their strangeness. And yet they have not: Imagine Big, all 300 pounds of him, packing heat, dressed in woman’s clothes; once your mind’s eye has seen that, you won’t ever lose it. It’s indelible.
On Born Again, he is immobilized, and can thus perform none of these tricks. You can feel the absence of his animating touch—his hot breath, his shrewd eye, his capacious ear. This is when the mortification of his body was complete, and he was rendered as just a voice that others could manipulate without his consent. He has nothing to do with the music and no way of playing against his environment. As a result, there’s no inner music at work, nothing much to listen harder for. A good artist leads you into their genre from some other, outside place, showing you the familiar shapes through the warping lens of their mind. Their individual predilections and quirks become elemental laws of physics, rules. Biggie’s voice is all over Born Again, but you feel the absence of his mind. Here, he is just a gangsta rapper, the nimblest one that ever lived.
