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It would be easy to dismiss the fact that Notorious B.I.G. released an album called Life After Death on this day in 1997 (only a few weeks after his own murder) as just a sick coincidence, but in reality it was party of a larger theme for the man born Christopher Wallace. For all of his raps about living large, Biggie was obsessed with death. After all, this is a man who titled his debut album Ready to Die and often rapped about his own funeral. He was constantly aware of his own mortality, and it permeated every inch of his musical persona.

Still, the whole idea of Life After Death hitting store shelves only 16 days after Biggie passed away is more than a little bit haunting. The album cover depicted the MC standing next to an old style hearse, draped in spooky shadows with a ghostly look on his face. Despite the greatness of flashy singles like "Hypnotize" and "Mo Money, Mo Problems," the best songs on the two-disc affair are loaded with dark imagery that vividly portrays the dark side of the gangster lifestyle, including the claustrophobic album opener "Somebody's Gotta Die" and the bracing "You're Nobody (Til Somebody Kills You)."

Tragically, that was Biggie at his best. His biggest hits were about his the high-class pimp lifestyle ("Big Poppa") or love jams ("One More Chance"), but he was never better as a rapper when he tapped into that rare combination of hunger and paranoia that fueled his death-filled fantasies. The Biggie that gave the world "Warning" — that's the Biggie that will live forever in the minds of hip-hop fans everywhere.

Tags Notorious-BIG, video

There are a handful of events that hip-hop fans will always remember, like the first time they heard Fear of a Black Planet, the day they saw the premiere of Tupac's "California Love" video or the fact that Jay-Z's The Blueprint came out on September 11, 2001. March 9 is one of those days, as it will forever be remembered as the day that Notorious B.I.G. (also known as Biggie Smalls and as his birth name Christopher Wallace) died after being gunned down in Los Angeles.

Biggie and his crew had just left a party following the Soul Train Awards and were stopped at a traffic light when another car pulled up next to them and opened fire on Biggie's vehicle. Since he was in the passenger seat, Biggie took the brunt of the shots that ultimately lead to his death. The execution was eerily similar to the shooting death of rival Tupac in Las Vegas some six months earlier, and many speculated at the time that Biggie's death was the final straw of the East Coast/West Coast feud between Bad Boy Records and Death Row Records. Despite the number of eyewitnesses, Biggie's murder remains unsolved.

In a macabre twist of fate, the Notorious B.I.G.'s death came only a handful of days before the release of his second album, which was already set to be called Life After Death. Though he only released a single collection while he was still alive (1994's game-changing Ready to Die), Biggie's legacy as one of the best MCs to ever rhyme words with a beat is set in stone. Unlike Tupac, Biggie didn't leave behind a wealth of material, and the posthumous albums collecting B.I.G.'s freestyles and demo recordings have ranged from middling to downright blasphemous. Still, there's "Dead Wrong," the imagined team-up with Eminem that appeared on Life After Death. It's a reasonable horrorcore tune, but the video is the real treat, full of behind-the-scenes clips of a genius at work and at play. Christopher Wallace was only 24 years old when he died, but the Notorious B.I.G. will live forever.

Tags Notorious-BIG, video