There never was a New York hip-hop season quite like the autumn of 1994, when 22-year-old Bed-Stuy native Christopher Wallace, a.k.a. the Notorious B.I.G., released his debut album. Biggie, who signed with Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs and later joined Bad Boy Records, had been popping up in guest spots.

The songs on Ready to Die gave gangsta rap a New York spin. Like Mickey Spillane, he was a virtuoso teller of hard-boiled street tales, and he was a thugged-out Woody Allen, a classic New York neurotic, stressed by the squad car on the corner, by other hustlers eyeing his loot, by the “everyday struggle.” Ready to Die wasn’t just a personal triumph, it was a municipal one: a New York reclamation of rap, whose center of gravity had shifted to Los Angeles. Of course, the East Coast–West Coast feud was far more serious than anyone believed; soon, it would claim the lives of both Tupac Shakur and Biggie. But for a glorious long moment, New York hip-hop felt reinvigorated, even utopian.

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