There’s a moment, about halfway through Ready to Die, when the Notorious B.I.G. begins to sound like a motivational speaker. The first line of "Everyday Struggle" is "I know how it feel to wake up fucked up"; you can picture the headset mic, hear the high school kids giggle at the cuss word. Big commiserates with the audience. He understands why they're so stressed out, knows the weight of waking up, feels the specter of bills. "I remember, I was just like you," he raps. He didn’t want to get a GED, he wanted to get paid. So that's what he did—off of the little vials that littered Bed-Stuy and the bigger shipments he took with him down to Raleigh. The story has a familiar arc, one that bends toward redemption and then toward wisdom you can package by the seminar.

Only that's not where Big ends up. The song's second verse ends with his friends murdered or in prison, its third with him terrified, resigned to a war with the cops who know his first name. The only time he exudes anything like joy is when he raps about fleeing an assault charge. The chorus is the bottom of that downward spiral: "I don't wanna live no more ."

The death Big raps about on his debut album—the one he succumbs to at its end—is not the mythic one that Tupac seemed to court on his own records. Big would come around to that later: the last song on Life After Death is called "You're Nobody (‘Til Somebody Kills You)." But on Ready to Die, the fatalism is not large or defiant—or mythic. It’s small, ugly, and inevitable. On that final song, before he finally pulls the trigger, he says that he doesn't want to go to heaven, because God probably wouldn’t let him stay in bed all day.

Ready to Die was recorded in two distinct periods. There were the first sessions, when Big was a ravenous kid who'd been signed to Uptown Records by an eager young A&R guy named Sean Combs. From his earliest demo tapes, Big had a superhuman sense of timing, a charisma that bled through the mic, a feel for how to make a word or phrase seem muscular or menacing or like something out of a high-comic radio play. But through 1993, he rapped in a slightly higher register than the one you remember from "Hypnotize," and seemed more like he was searching for the frayed edges of his voice. He was unquestionably in control, it was just a different kind of control. This is when Big cut songs like "Gimme the Loot"—a knotty little masterwork which sounds, vocally, like a duet with a more manic version of himself.

Those 1993 songs are full of crime—petty crime, violent crime, crime that isn't catalyst for personal growth or narrative motion. The kind of crime that exists because hungry young men need to eat. It can be brutal (the infamous anecdote about robbing pregnant women for "#1 MOM" pendants on "Gimme The Loot") and even embarrassing (on the album’s intro, he plays his teenaged self, robbing a train because his mom won’t let him hold any money). He raps about it animatedly. He’s vivid, he’s detailed, he can be slyly or uproariously funny. He tells you exactly where he keeps the Mac-10 in the Land Rover. Taken as a whole, these vignettes paint Big’s life as perilous, materially difficult. They also show what a staggering gift he had for narrative: no two stories have the same entry or exit point, the same mechanism for getting the characters to interact, the same energy. "Loot" has a loose cannon friend who brags that he’s "been robbing motherfuckers since the slave ships," while "Warning" plays out through a series of rumors, filtered through clipped calls on maybe-bugged land lines.