Culture
24 Feb 22

The Notorious B.I.G's legacy to be celebrated with a reissuing of 1997 LP Life After Death

The Notorious B.I.G's legacy to be celebrated with a reissuing of 1997 LP <i>Life After Death</i>

The deluxe box set is part of the campaign The Sky’s the Limit: A Year Celebrating the Legacy of the Notorious B.I.G..

The Notorious B.I.G's landmark 1997 album, Life After Death, is getting a reissue this year to celebrate what would have been the late rapper's 50th birthday.

Biggy's estate has announced that a super deluxe box set of the LP will be released on June 10th through Bad Boy/Rhino/Atlantic Records. The box set consists of the entire original work plus 12'' releases of iconic tracks like 'Hypnotize', 'Mo Money Mo Problems', 'Sky's The limit', and 'Nasty Boy'.

Also included in the re-release is a commemorative booklet with rare photos, liner notes by Pitchfork contributor Sheldon Pearce, and commentary from original collaborators.

The box set is just one aspect of a larger celebration around the iconic rapper. Starting March 25, The Sky’s the Limit: A Year Celebrating the Legacy of the Notorious B.I.G. campaign will be a year-long event including 4k upgrades of his entire video catalogue to a host of online events.

In March of last year, the hip-hop legend's rise to fame was commemorated in a Netflix documentary titled Biggie: I Got A Story To Tell –.

The film was the first estate-approved doc about the rapper and features rare behind-the-scenes footage and testimonies of his closest friends and family – including his mother Voletta Wallace and his long-time collaborator Sean 'Puff Daddy' Combs.

"The running joke about documentary films is often how long they take to make," director Emmett Malloy told Rolling Stone. "This film lived up to all those stereotypes, taking us four years to develop and make it. Through those years we were immersed in Brooklyn in the '70s through the '90s. It is easy to see how much Brooklyn has changed since Christopher Wallace was a kid, but it’s also clear that many things about being a young black man in this country have not changed.”

In 2020, the Notorious B.I.G was posthumously inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame by P. Diddy. Among his honourees were JAY-Z, Nas, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and his family.

Mere weeks before the original release of Life After Death, Biggy was shot at a stoplight in Los Angeles. The murder was thought to be a culmination of an ongoing feud between East and West hip-hop. Six months earlier, rapper Tupac Shakur was shot in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas.