This will be a special 2 part post remembering and celebrating the death anniversary of Notorious B.I.G. Therefore, Part 1 of this series I am going to show you how the Notorious B.I.G’s Style and Flow is described on his Wikipedia page. And In part 2 of the series we will break down the different points that was made in this article.
Style
Allmusic describe Wallace as having “a loose, easy flow” with “a talent for piling multiple rhymes on top of one another in quick succession”.[4] Time magazine wrote Wallace rapped with an ability to “make multi-syllabic rhymes sound… smooth”,[22] while Krims describes Wallace’s rhythmic style as “effusive“.[68] Before starting a verse, Wallace sometimes used onomatopoeicvocables to “warm up” (for example “uhhh” at the beginning of “Hypnotize” and “Big Poppa” and “whaat” after certain rhymes in songs such as “My Downfall”).[69]Wallace mostly rapped on his songs in a deep tone described by Rolling Stone as a “thick, jaunty grumble”,[66] which went deeper on Life After Death.[67] He was often accompanied on songs with ad libs from Sean “Puffy” Combs. On The Source‘s Unsigned Hype, they described his style as “cool, nasal, and filtered, to bless his own material”.
Lateef of Latyrx notes that Wallace had, “intense and complex flows”,[70] Fredro Starr of Onyx says, “Biggie was a master of the flow”,[71] and Bishop Lamont states that Wallace mastered “all the hemispheres of the music”.[72] “Notorious B.I.G. also often used the single-line rhyme scheme to add variety and interest to his flow”.[70] Big Daddy Kane suggests that Wallace didn’t need a large vocabulary to impress listeners – “he just put his words together a slick way and it worked real good for him”.[73] Wallace was known to compose lyrics in his head, rather than write them down on paper, in a similar way to Jay-Z.[74][75]
Wallace would occasionally vary from his usual style. On “Playa Hater” from his second album, he sang in a slow-falsetto.[76] On his collaboration with Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, “Notorious Thugs“, he modified his style to match the rapid rhyme flow of the group.
