Things start in earnest with the cinematic boom-bap of the Main Ingredient-sampling Things Done Changed. The album begins with a contemporary skit-style intro, in which Biggie’s birth is enacted to the strains of Curtis Mayfield’s Superfly, before waltzing at speed through his fractured early life. Ready To Die, then, stands as the start of a tragically short-lived career whose full potential was never fully revealed. By that point, however, Biggie would, incomprehensibly, be dead – another victim of the violence that plagued hip-hop in the 90s. Through still in its early days, Bad Boy Entertainment had already produced multiple hits, but The Notorious B.I.G.’s storytelling rhymes – both in the form of his effortless thug-rap and the masterful loverman hits he agreed to include only after some serious arm-twisting – gave the label a multi-platinum success that not only laid the groundwork for Biggie’s follow-up, the diamond-selling 1997 double-album, Life After Death, but shaped the course of hip-hop throughout the remainder of the decade and beyond. However, Ready To Die also featured production from several of hip-hop’s most legendary backroom boys, helping Combs’ nascent company to truly stake its claim to greatness. Combs, aka Puff Daddy, and his in-house team of producers did much of the work on the record, and Bad Boy’s head honcho himself played the very capable hype man to Biggie’s star-making turn.
Starting life while Biggie was still part of the Uptown Records stable, the album was eventually released by Sean Combs’ Bad Boy Entertainment operation in 1994. The Brooklyn-born Christopher George Latore Wallace, aka The Notorious B.I.G., aka Biggie Smalls, delivered a sucker punch with his multi-platinum-selling debut album, Ready To Die.
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