He decides to call up his friend-a flashy and hard-hearted cutthroat from the Southwest who was once featured on America's Most Wanted-to partake in a heist that involves a female Puerto Rican hotel worker who used to be drug boss, and a Jamaican with long dreadlocks and a taste for Asian women. On “Niggas Bleed,” Big is a bagman sent to secure a large drug transaction, but his greed has him thinking about a double-cross: “I kill them all, I'll be set for life,” he imagines. This feat of storytelling is repeated two more times on the first disc of this double album alone. Big's reaction is immediate: “Is he in critical? Retaliation for this one won't be minimal ’cause I'm a criminal way before the rap shit, bust the gat shit-Puff won't even know what happened.” We’re settling into a bloody noir, complete with well-developed minor characters harboring demented pathos and subtle foreshadowing-all this before any hints of a radio single.

It begins sometime within the last record’s timeline, with Big “sittin' in the crib dreamin' about Learjets and coupes, the way Salt 'shoops', and how to sell records like Snoop,” when a fellow small-time drug dealer and jailmate informs him that a mutual friend has been shot for robbing a crack dealer in a most ruthless manner (“pistol whipped his kids and taped up his wife”). The proper arrival of this album comes on “Somebody's Gotta Die,” a pure revenge tale. But where the first album started with a feeling of hope arising from the muck and mire of urban poverty, Life After Death announces itself in much starker fashion. Ready to Die, Biggie’s previous album, also began with heart-pulling cinematic flourishes, featuring a decade-spanning montage that played as a mini saga telling the tale of a small-time street thug who was raised in a dysfunctional home and turned into a formidably successful rapper.

Life after death biggie album art