Ready to Die by Notorious B.I.G.

Ready to Die, the Notorious B.I.G.'s debut, came out on September 13, 1994, on Sean Combs' Bad Boy label through Arista, and it's a young Brooklyn hustler's story told with a storyteller's eye and a laidback, rolling flow that makes even the grimmest scenes go down easy. Recorded at the Hit Factory and D&D Studios in New York across 1993 and 1994, it takes beats from Combs, Easy Mo Bee, Chucky Thompson, DJ Premier and Lord Finesse, and Method Man drops by for a guest spot.

The record swings between hard-luck dread and party-time swagger. "Juicy" led the way, "Big Poppa" went to number six and drew a Grammy nomination, and "One More Chance" kept the run going. It put East Coast rap back on top while the West Coast was running the charts, and it was the only album he released in his lifetime: he was murdered in 1997, shortly before his second came out. It has since gone six-times platinum and joined the National Recording Registry in 2024.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.