This song was Biggie going toe-to-toe with the best guy in the city, winning, and then keeping it moving. He ends his last verse with, “Yeah, thought so.” It’s a ridiculous display of bravado. All his threats are concrete and tangible. Biggie is pure, unrefined cold-bloodedness. 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. 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. 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, at his peak, had a dangerous sing-songy purr, a way of hopping around the track while staying dead in the pocket. 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. 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. There are those breathy Puffy interjections. There are those shards of older rap classics on the intro track, those sampled swirls of old soul songs. There are a few non-Biggie voices on Ready To Die. Best to leave Ready To Die alone, to let it be great. I have a hard time believing that any extra song, even that song, could make it better. It is as close to full-length perfection as rap music has ever come. Ready To Die is, for my money, the best rap album ever made. As much as I want to hear that hypothetical collab - and I would punch a puppy in the eye to hear it - it’s honestly better that the song never had a chance to exist. He wanted Ready To Die to have a slick, populist sense of focus to it, and that’s exactly what it had. And here’s what kills me: Puffy was right. But Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs vetoed the plan. If he’d been on a track with those guys together, he would’ve had to be both at the same time, and he could’ve done it. Biggie could be as raw and rugged as M.O.P., and he could be as intense and cerebral as Jeru. Imagine if he was on a track with three guys who knew that Premier sound inside and out. And Biggie could do no wrong during those Ready To Die sessions. Premier’s creative peak coincided exactly with Biggie’s all-too-brief career. Can you even imagine what that would sound like? How fucking incredible that would’ve been? There are precious few Biggie/Premier collabs, but every last one of them is a solid-gold classic. Word around the campfire is that Biggie Smalls, when he was recording Ready To Die, wanted to record a track with DJ Premier and M.O.P.