What isn’t often considered is the unspoken possibility of each new album being the last. Not as a result of self-imposed retirement, but the expiration of life. Every album (or song) we receive from a rapper, singer, or band might serve as their final encore. As life returns to blackness, as caskets sink into soil, all we have to hold in the end is what was given.
Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black was an acclaimed sophomore album before tragedy transformed the deeply personal opus into an emotion-piercing inkwell of sadness. Recovery and redemption never came for the jazz darling like many hoped; thus, the songs from her 2006 album aged like relics.
The last fossils of the songstress before time froze indefinitely. “Rehab,” the album’s introduction and winner of three GRAMMY Awards including Record and Song of the Year, is a harrowing listen seven years after Winehouse's alcohol-induced passing. Back to Black in its entirety is a poetically troubled soul voicing her pain to the pleasure of the masses, consumed by the very black she swore to go back to. Unlike Amy Winehouse, who passed away five years after her last studio album, Biggie Smalls was 16 days away from the release of his highly anticipated sophomore album, Life After Death, when death snatched the prodigious talent in a blaze of violence. The 24-year-old son of Brooklyn was hopeful of better days to come before his final hour. Hip-hop saved his life, awarding the lyrical mastermind prosperity for personifying greatness, and then it brought doom before he could witness the future he began to envision for himself.