What’s that? You want a list of examples, then, demonstrating the breakdown? I THOUGHT YOU’D NEVER ASK However, I do believe where you fall in the RTD/ Illmatic continuum can accurately predict what side you’ll take in the majority of the great pop cultural debates of our time–whether in music, film, television, sports or even trash literature. I doubt that choosing Ready to Die over Illmatic can be an accurate forecaster of whether you will cook or eat out for dinner tonight, go for the towels or the dryer after washing your hands in a public restroom, or vote for the Democratic or Republican candidate in the next presidential election (frankly, I secretly suspect all rappers of being closeted Republicans, and in the case of Nas, not even closeted anymore). So now that I’ve gotten all this out of the way, do I believe, like the K-Man, that you can predict all major life decisions a person will make based on their preference between these two albums? Nah. Ready to Die, however, quickly achieved the blockbuster status it was destined for, spawning three top 40 hits (including the #2 remix of “One More Chance”), going multi-platinum, and establishing Biggie as the rapper who put the East Coast back on the map at the height of the G-Funk era. Illmatic was never much more than a street classic, getting the coveted Five Mics rating from The Source and becoming a word-of-mouth success, but only selling about 500k and spawning no top 40 hits (the biggest, “It Ain’t Hard to Tell,” topped out at #92). The differences between the two albums are perfectly reflected in their commercial legacies, which unlike their critical reputations, are wildly divergent. The songs, while obviously personal, still feel far more distant than those on Ready to Die–Nas is less of a personality than Biggie, and his songs seem more concerned with their street poetry and hypnotic hooks than in really letting you into the world of Nasir Jones. Illmatic, on the other hand, is a much less expansive album–seven tracks shorter, for one, and much more unified across the board in terms of feeling and sound, despite the legendary cast of diverse producers. The songs are unabashedly personal and overwhelmingly emotional, while the beats run from suffocating paranoia to lush, 80s R&B-sampled velvet. Ready to Die plays out in big-budget widescreen, an almost-operatic narrative that plays out like The Tragedy of Christopher Bridges. However, despite the overwhelming musical and cultural overlap between these two albums, subtle multitudes of artistic and conceptual differencies lie underneath the surface. (But of course, you can still find fanboys to claim that their over-ambitious, less acclaimed but more commercially successful follow-ups are superior). Most importantly, both near-unanimously acclaimed as not only their respective artists’ masterpiece, but as the go-to choices for the greatest hip-hop album of the entire decade–rivalled possibly only by Wu-Tang Clan’s Enter the Wu-Tang: The 36 Chambers as the one 90s rap album you simply can’t find people to hate on. Both concerned with street life and self-empowerment, both largely centered around vivid story-telling, and both highly ambivalent about life in general. Two New York-based debut rap albums, released in 1994. idea from Simmons).Īnyway, Ready to Die and Illmatic. (Plus, the only two writers I have the capacity to properly steal from are Klosterman and Bill Simmons, and I already stole the Vs. But the idea is there, and so we can overlook the finer points. I assume few, if any, people outside the realm of 80s basketball superfandom can really follow the points Klosto makes to cement his argument, and even within that circle, most are probably left scratching their heads at least once by the end of the article. And to continue my unblemished streak of honesty, reading it again before writing this article left me more confused than ever. To be even more honest, I still didn’t understand it the next three or four times I read it. To be honest, I didn’t understand this article the first time I read it. Consequently, just about everyone in the world, whether they realize it or not, is either a Lakers person or a Celtics person, subconsciously living their lives according to the codes espoused by one of these two outfits–and those that don’t, says CK, simply don’t believe in anything. The two teams, he said, were diametrically opposite in nearly all ways, nominally in terms of the respective ideologies they represented. One of the better Klosterman articles* from Sex, Drugs & Cocoa Puffs takes on the decade-long rivalry between the Boston Celtics and Los Angeles Lakers in the 1980s, in which one of the two teams made the finals every year and they faced each other in the main event three times. I never sleep, ‘coz sleep is played out like Kwame and them fuckin’ polka dots
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