Revisionist History #2: Two Alternate Takes on Life After Death (1997)

I had hoped to get back to these sooner, but we’re finally back with a new entry in the Revisionist History series, in which I take an existing album and play around with the track sequencing in an effort to come up with something more cohesive or entertaining or whatever the challenge happens to be. (Now all I have to do is publish another Max’s Book Club entry and I’ll be set.)

The second lucky hip hop album to be given this treatment is The Notorious B.I.G.’s double-disc posthumous effort, Life After Death, also known as the last album the late rapper had any input in prior to his passing. Building upon what he and executive producer-slash-label boss Sean “Puffy” Combs had crafted with his debut, Ready to Die, Life After Death was a calculated attempt at world domination, featuring songs designed to appeal to East Coast hip hop heads, West Coast fanatics, and everyone in the flyover states, with Biggie’s vocals occupying space atop beats that would either bang on the radio or, in the man’s words, “leave [you] on the pavement”. It was released to widespread acclaim and ultimately sold over eleven million copies (a combination of both streams and physical units), none of which the man was able to enjoy during his lifetime. Joining me in my quest to revise history once again is Lord AAA (of Boom Bap Reviews), also known as frequent contributor shoe-in. 

Revisionist History #1: Two Alternate Takes on Wu-Tang Forever (1997)

An idea I had been toying with for a long time, but only for the better part of a year as a serious endeavor, is a new series that will be referred to, for now anyway, as Revisionist History. With this, yet another excuse for me to not write an album review (I'm not exactly hurting for those, right?), I aim to explore just how important an album's sequencing is for its success. Putting songs in a specific order on any project is an art form, one that I am currently practicing through the trial-by-fire that is recording any episode of RandoMax Radio, and the way one song flows into the next deeply impacts how it is received by the listener. Or at least it does when the artists gives a shit.

Not that sequencing even seems to matter in the streaming era, when anyone can simply just hit 'next' whenever they don't want to listen to a thing, but there are some artists that do seem to treat this seriously, and I wish to honor them by, basically, trying to make their projects sound better.

I plan to do this through a combination of editing and re-sequencing - the "editing" being, simply put, getting rid of the filler shit that doesn't work for me, while the "re-sequencing" is exactly what it sounds like. The first entrant into this series is the Wu-Tang Clan sophomore album Wu-Tang Forever, which has been redone by both myself and Lord AAA (of the No Knockoffs Radio Wavecast and Boom Bap Reviews), also known as frequent contributor shoe-in.