Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I know, I know. How could I give one of the hottest hip hop albums of all time two stars, right? Well I've got a better question for you: How could Bad Boy piss all over Biggie's legacy and mutilate this classic? Before they spend their money on this fakeness, the fans have the right to know...especially the young folks who weren't even around back in the day...that the album you see before you...this so called "remaster"...is NOT what Biggie fans rocked out to in '94. This is NOT the album that was bangin' in the clubs, in our cars, or at our house parties. Take it from someone who was there, this so-called "remaster" is not just an enhancement of sound quality as the name might imply, it's a totally different album. Don't get it twisted, the original version, the one with the white cover, wasn't some rough mix that was stolen from Easy Mo Bee's basement and released on the streets as a bootleg or whatever...it was the official studio release. The one you bought at Sam Goody, Coconuts, or, until 2006, right here on amazon. And now it's gone forever in favor of this inferior mess. And why? Money, mostly. And a touch of political correctness. 1.) Bad Boy's legal department apparently f'd up and some of the samples used on the original weren't cleared properly, so rather than tap into their billions and just pay whatever licensing fees were necessary for the re-release, Diddy and company decided to just CHANGE THE ORIGINALS!!! So now, tracks like "Machine Gun Funk" and "Ready to Die" sound totally different. They are not at all what we heard when we first bumped this album back in '94. 2.) Some of Biggie's original lyrics were apparently too raw for the sensibilities of the new millenium so they were edited out or backmastered. Most notably on "Juicy" where he spits "time to get paid/blow up like the World Trade" referencing the 1993 attack on the towers. On the remaster, the words "World Trade" are edited out, presumably because someone might think he was making a reference to 9/11 seven years before it actually happened. While I understand that 9/11 was a catastrophic and horrible event, and would certainly agree that a rapper using it as a euphemism for accruing wealth would be unbelievably crass, I also don't think that record companies should go back and selectively edit albums that came out seven years before the tragedy even happened because someone might think that Biggie was Nostradamus and predicted the whole thing in his crystal ball, thus compromising his original vision and lyricism. Now that this "remaster" has come out, the only way to get the original is to run it down in some used record store. Think about what this means. Kids who grew up hearing that Biggie was the best and wanting to hear the album that their elders say prove it will rush to purchase or download this "remaster", because it's the only thing available, not realizing that they are NOT hearing what those of us who copped the original heard back in '94. They're not hearing Biggie as we heard him. They're not hearing his magnum opus. They're hearing a compromised, mutilated version of that album. Again, think about what this says about Bad Boy's respect for their greatest artist, the man whose talent they pretty much rode to wealth and glory. Would anyone dare to dream of doing this to the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's", Bob Marley's "Catch a Fire" or Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On"? No? Then what does this say about Bad Boy's respect for Biggie and hip hop as an artform in general? Because it's Biggie, I can't bring myself to give even this mangled version of his vision one star, but because this musical mutilation is the auditory equivalent of putting boxer shorts on Donatello's David or a bra on the Venus de Milo, I also can't bring myself to give it more than two. To the young hip hop headz out there, consider yourselves warned. If you want to hear Biggie as 90s headz heard him when this classic disc first dropped back in the day, this isn't the version you're looking for. Pressure Bad Boy to re-release the "classic version" full and intact. Peace.