Notorious BIG’s skits set a precedent
The album opens with a birth. Then come sex scenes, shootings, moments of desperation. Before even a single note plays, “Ready to Die” it speaks to you. It screams at you, it gives birth to you, it shoots at you. It’s 1994, and the skits Of The Notorious B.I.Gthose sound fragments of dialogues, moans, gunshots, breaths and screams, are surprising and teach, becoming a reference. He wasn’t the first to use skits, but he was among the first to transform them into an organic part of the narrativeprofoundly influencing how rap records would tell stories from then on.
Everything is raw, disturbing, but perfectly consistent with Biggie’s world: a boy from Brooklyn which tells the story of the road as if it were a film, except that here there is no fiction, only real life. The skits they are not simple sound interludes: they are invisible chapters, created in the studio and implemented with real sampled sounds, also possible thanks to some intuitions of the producer Puff Daddy. They tie the songs together, give them context, create narrative tension. They make you understand that “Ready to Die” it’s not just a record: it is a sonic biography, a journey from birth to death, from dream to disasteror. In an era in which rap was still looking for the right form to tell its story, Biggie uses a technique in a magical way. The skits they are the soundtrack of a mind that confesses itself without a filter, that shows everything, even what no one wanted to hear. From that moment, every hip hop record has had to deal with the brutal wayhonest and brilliant of those who knew how to photograph reality.
