It became a document of celebration, not sadness. And yet Life After Death took on a life of its own. (Biggie was a star before his death, but he became a genre-transcending superstar afterward.) All these morbid, poetic coincidences should dominate the album’s narrative.

It ends with a song called “You’re Nobody Till Somebody Kills You” - and in Biggie’s case, that turned out to be vaguely true. It is called Life After Death, which is, in retrospect, even weirder than Hole recording an album called Live Through This before Kurt Cobain’s suicide and then releasing it almost immediately afterward. Life After Death came out barely two weeks later. It was sudden and shocking and violent, and the murder remains unsolved. Here, we had the single greatest talent of his generation cut down in his prime - or maybe, since he was only 24, before he’d even had a chance to reach his prime. By all rights, that’s exactly what should’ve happened. Perhaps the greatest testament to the power of Life After Death, the second and final album from the Notorious B.I.G., was that Biggie’s death somehow didn’t overshadow it.

Life after death biggie smalls