Puffy is lamenting his demise as we hear dramatic piano keys give way to falling raindrops.

The introduction on Life After Death picks up where Biggie last left us on the outro to Ready to Die, with his suicide still ringing in our ears as heвЂ™s being rushed to the emergency room. Despite having some genuinely great material on their double-disc extravaganzas, neither JAY-Z nor Nas could pull off that kind of excess. ItвЂ™s 24 tracks deep, and thatвЂ™s not even counting a multitude of skits peppered between those two dozen songs. Much of this is done through sequencing, which can make or break an album, no matter the individual quality of its tracks.ДЇew albums in hip-hop history make a stronger argument for this case than The Notorious B.I.G.вЂ™s Life After Death.ДЄt first glance, Life After Death shouldnвЂ™t work. Not necessarily in a literal sense-though, it certainly can-but in that every good album has a beginning, middle and end, and that as a whole itвЂ™s more than the sum of its parts. In a culture where the lives of young, black men have become increasingly expendable, it's now necessary to state what once seemed obvious: Biggie Smalls did not want to die.A succession of hits, no matter their individual success, does not make an album. There's a haunted sadness to the sung refrain, and beneath it a spoken plea is audible: 'I don't wanna die, I don't wanna die, I don't wanna die. Phone callers' issue threats: 'I'm gonna kill you,' 'We comin' for you.' On the closing 'You're Nobody (Til Somebody Kills You),' Smalls' world-weary delivery indicates that he considers the song title to be a perverted joke.

He acknowledges a vulnerability that verges on paranoia in 'My Downfall,' swathed in mournful strings and neo-operatic female voices: 'Before I go to sleep, I check the bed and the closet.' Kelly, in preborn-again mode on You Tonight.'Д«ut near the end of the disc, Smalls is no longer the playful rogue, the marauding hustler prowling his ghetto kingdom. 1 on the Billboard pop charts on the strength of a mesmerizing party single, 'Hypnotize.' There's more raw fun in the 'Hypnotize' vein with cameos by Too Short, Lil' Kim, Puff Daddy, Angela Winbush and R. Instead, Smalls and Combs have made a disc packed with hook-filled arrangements that straddle the worlds of hard-core hip-hop and mainstream rhythm and blues - even before Smalls' death, the disc almost certainly would have made its debut at No. But Smalls also avoids petty tit-for-tat posturing there are no putdowns of his late verbal sparring partner Shakur, no words to fuel the purported rivalry between East and West Coast. Too many tracks settle into pimp-gangbanger cliches with numbingly explicit language, casual misogyny and, in two instances, homophobic references. 'Life After Death' has its share of filler.

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