CLOSED - 750: Round 1: Take Care v. Life After Death

[Precedent]

Captain: Precedent

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Take Care by Drake

v.

Captain: HigherThanTheSun

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Life After Death by The Notorious B.I.G.

[Kiki]

Take Care has to get passed the first round. It would be disappointment otherwise.

[Precedent]

[eyezayzay]

Life After Death is Biggie's best IMO and it's pretty great. Drake is solid but solid isn't good enough when you're paired against LAD.
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[junodog4]

[RockyRaccoon]

It's Life After Death and they're not even in the same temporal plane.
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2023 Chart

Early Psychedelic Rock

Electronic Chart

[WindowAbove]

Take Care is boring melodrama. Life After Death, while too long, is the better album here

[Puncture Repair]

I think both are very lumbering, overbloated, and they're from two artists that I struggle to enjoy as much as they are praised.

I'm going to have to give it to Biggie though. Drake to me always feels like his ideas and sounds are too big for him, like he doesn't fit, or he's always just one step behind another artist. Biggie's music, on the other hand, is totally effortless - I doubt he even gave a damn when he was in the proccess of being shot, and this album is why I believe that.

[Skinny]

I love both of these records. Drake may be the closest thing I have to a guilty pleasure in my regular listening behaviour, being an artist who I know is completely insincere and just saying what he thinks his fans want to hear, and yet I still love his music. Take Care is quite easily his best record, a coherent record that walks the thin line between hip-hop and R'n'B, shrouded in atmospheric production which matches Drake's tales of lost love and empty materialistic pleasures. Yes, he's an extremely contradictory artist who can't decide whether he hates or loves women/fame/money, but on songs like 'Marvin's Room' or 'Over My Dead Body' I can completely forgive him his many sins because they're just really fucking great songs. And 'Headlines' and 'H.Y.F.R.' are two of my all-time favourite party anthems, songs which instantly light up a dancefloor and encourage the sort of boorish shoutalongs without which parties would be incomplete. Yes, the record's probably too long, and at times Drake comes across as horribly slimy, but I guess those are just the excesses of Drake, and are therefore ironically the exact things that make Take Care his most powerful album - they actually reveal something about the man behind the contradictions and the hollow lines; Drake sees himself as a genius, one capable of making a sprawling hip-hop album that sounds like a cross between Aaliyah and Lil' Wayne, and that attempts to show every side of his personality (including those which he made up for show). It might not be perfect, it might not be sincere, but it's very much an album in its maker's image. Which, incidentally, is more than can be said for Life After Death, which feels just a little too smooth and poppy compared to its superior predecessor, but which still stands as one of my favourite hip-hop albums. This album is as much about Puffy's pop sensibilities as it is about Biggie's rapping ('Hypnotize' would be a shadow of the song it is in somebody else's hands, to give just one example), but that works for this record. It doesn't feel quite as personal overall as Ready To Die, nor does it have the same sort of focus that made that album play out like a movie, and it is definitely too long, but it's difficult to deny any record that contains the aforementioned 'Hypnotize', 'Mo Money, Mo Problems', 'Notorious Thugs', 'Ten Crack Commandments', 'Going Back to Cali', 'Sky's the Limit' (!), etcetera etcetera. Biggie is one of the most natural, charismatic rappers of all-time, an artist who spit rugged rhymes with an impeccably smooth flow, and his two studio albums stand tall as two of the best albums of all-time. Life After Death might not be as good as Ready to Die, but it's still a better album than Drake's (admittedly excellent) best.
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2021 in full effect. Come drop me some recs. Y'all know what I like.

[RepoMan]