Ready To Die is, for my money, the best rap album ever made. It is as close to full-length perfection as rap music has ever come. I have a hard time believing that any extra song, even that song, could make it better. Best to leave Ready To Die alone, to let it be great. There are a few non-Biggie voices on Ready To Die. There are those shards of older rap classics on the intro track, those sampled swirls of old soul songs. There are those breathy Puffy interjections. There’s reggae singer Diana King growling all over “Respect.” But there is only one guest-rapper on Ready To Die, and that turned out to be a very canny casting decision. The one guy is Method Man, easily the hottest rapper in New York at the time, a guy who carried a mysterious forbidding energy to everything he did. Meth, at his peak, had a dangerous sing-songy purr, a way of hopping around the track while staying dead in the pocket. And he’s in peak form on “The What”: “I spit on your grave, then I grab my Charles Dickens.” And still, Method Man loses. Meth was used to RZA’s broken-piano minor-key evilscapes, but producer Easy Mo Bee’s warm, gooey soul-sample lope gives Biggie home-field advantage. More to the point, Meth is still making goofy pop-culture references and silly jokes, talking about his six-shooter and his horse named Trigger. Biggie is pure, unrefined cold-bloodedness. All his threats are concrete and tangible. He ends his last verse with, “Yeah, thought so.” It’s a ridiculous display of bravado.
This song was Biggie going toe-to-toe with the best guy in the city, winning, and then keeping it moving.
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