January 24, 2006 @ 1:52 pm

Notorious B.I.G. - Duets: The Final Chapter (Bad Boy)

by: Jon Caramanica

Tribute, though, is an imperfect exercise in ego. Even Diddy knows this. At the outset of Duets: The Final Chapter — the second and reportedly last posthumously compiled Bad Boy collection of Biggie material — he notes, “Critics laugh / Say I made a fortune off his past / All I did is build a dynasty off his passion.” That may be so; compared to the Tupac industry, the Biggie cash-ins have been a model of restraint. But already B.I.G.’s legacy is showing signs of buckling under its own weight.

So why is this the way we pay homage, then, listening for that familiar syrupy baritone amid a disc full of once-weres and might-bes? It’s tough to filter out the clutter on Duets, which is, politely put, a thrilling cluster fuck, accommodating everybody and satisfying some. (And strictly speaking, most of these jam-packed tracks aren’t duets.)

Of the 16 songs, a few sport the ambition this project deserves. “Living in Pain” — produced by Just Blaze to sound like an anthemic funeral march, bolstered by Tupac, Nas, and Mary J. Blige — threatens to replace the famous “Biggie/Tupac Live Freestyle” as the definitive Big/’Pac collabo. “I’m With Whateva,” featuring Lil Wayne, Juelz Santana, and Jim Jones, sounds like an early N.W.A posse cut, thanks to a crisp, minimalist beat from former Hitman Stevie J. With Missy Elliott’s post-dancehall stutter flow and Scott Storch’s church synths, “Ultimate Rush” is a curiously eclectic outlier. And on “Just a Memory,” featuring the Clipse, Pusha T pays indirect, elegant tribute to his host: “Admire the verses / They’re inspired by the hearses / That carry my niggas / And have they church mothers cursing.”

Keeping up with Biggie is no easy task, even on the decade-old verses collected here, two of which — “Living in Pain” and the excellent “WhatchuWant,” featuring Jay-Z — are previously unreleased, with the rest culled from familiar songs (“Notorious Thugs,” “Respect,” “My Downfall”). As a whole, Duets feels less slapdash than its predecessor, 1999’s Born Again, though it reeks of regional carpetbagging, including everyone from Nelly to Scarface to Big Gee from Boyz N Da Hood. 50 Cent, responsible for the best posthumous Biggie collabo, “Realest N*ggas,” is noticeably absent, as is former boo Lil’ Kim.

And there are some glaring missteps as well. “Suicidal Thoughts,” the emotional, chorus-free last gasp that ends his classic debut, Ready to Die, and one of the most sacred songs in the Biggie oeuvre, is chopped tastelessly into three parts on “Hold Ya Head” to accommodate an elegiac hook from fellow overexploited legend Bob Marley. “Beef,” featuring Mobb Deep, is no more than a limpid revisiting of the arrogantly menacing “What’s Beef?”

In this deeply egalitarian era of mashups and mixtapes, revising Biggie or anyone is easy work. In the last two years alone, two masterful mixtapes — DJ Vlad and Dirty Harry’s Rap Phenomenon, a collection of blends and rarities, and DJ Cappel & Smitty’s Blue Eyes Meets Bed-Stuy, which paired Biggie with Frank Sinatra for The Grey Album–style affair — have demonstrated that, years after his passing, Biggie belongs to everyone in more ways than we, or even he, could have imagined. Our loyalty to him, our possessiveness of him, has become a shroud.

Can he live?

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Article tags: Notorious B.i.g., Duets: The Final Chapter, Diddy, Jay-z, Tupac, Mobb Deep