Essay on Music: B.I.G. and Radiohead

It began with a heartbeat. In 1994, Notorious B.I.G. (a.k.a. Christopher Wallace) released his debut album, Ready To Die, and started a New York renaissance by telling an album-length story.

It was mostly the story of Wallace's life, but this main character could have been straight out of a novel. Hazy details, universal themes, and skits that reinforced the visual plot, rather than just being funny. The first of these skits was the birth of the Biggie character. There was a heartbeat, a delivery, and a baby born into a world of screaming parents, crime, and Hip Hop.

In 2000, Radiohead destroyed rock and roll. All eyes were on the British group to follow up their previous release, OK Computer, which won nearly every award given that year and was immediately considered one of the greatest albums of all time.

Fans, critics, even other bands waited on them to show us where rock went next, but no one was prepared for what they unleashed. They responded with a collection of songs that contained nearly no live instruments, and told an album-length morality fable about the first human clone. It began with rhythmic electronic thumps, and a mechanical voice that would, over the course of the album, be engulfed in a sea of paranoia, desperation, and eventually suicide.

After B.I.G.'s Biggie character is taken through adolescence, signified by a robbery and then jail in songs like "Gimme The Loot" and "Things Done Changed", Biggie grows into himself. Starting with "Ready To Die", Biggie accepts his lot in life and excels at the kind of faux-Mob lifestyle that brings him up through the streets. He's even getting laid and hanging out with other New York rappers ("The What").

By track 10, Biggie would become Notorious B.I.G. On the first song, Kid A, the character, is immersed in modern noise and confusion. The voice he introduces himself with at the beginning of "Everything In Its Right Place" is distance and empty by the end of that song. "Kid A", the song, starts with a soothing electronic lullaby.